IBM Security has announced Watson for Cyber Security, a new cloud-based spinoff from its Watson cognitive technology platform that will be trained in the language of security.

The new service will begin with one year of research in partnership with eight universities in the United States to train Watson on the finer points of security research findings, with the ultimate goal of the platform being able to discover behavior patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed by existing security platforms.

IBM claims that the platform will be the first technology to offer cognition of security data at scale by utilizing Watson’s ability to reason and learn from unstructured data, including the 80 percent of all data on the internet that traditional security tools cannot process, including blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts, and other information.

The offering will also incorporate other Watson capabilities including data mining techniques for outlier detection, graphical presentation tools, and techniques for finding connections between related data points in different documents; one example given was Watson’s ability to find data on an emerging form of malware in an online security bulletin and data from a security analyst’s blog on an emerging remediation strategy.

“IBM efforts are designed to improve security analysts’ capabilities using cognitive systems that automate the connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies,” the company said in a statement. “IBM intends to begin beta production deployments that take advantage of IBM Watson for Cyber Security later this year.”

Skills shortage

IBM isn’t pitching the platform on its ability alone, but also on the basis that a skills shortage in the industry means traditional jobs simply won’t be filled.

“Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” IBM Security General Manager Marc van Zadelhoff said. “The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime.

“By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations, and knowledge to security professionals, bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training.”

IBM said that the platform will be fully open for business in 2017.

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