Even though artificial intelligence has incredible potential to augment the current cyber workforce and expand situational awareness, comprehensive integrations are needed for enhanced visibility, as evidenced by Darktrace AI, that continuously learns daily business operations. 

As the speed, efficacy, sophistication and scale of cyber attacks continues to grow, Darktrace AI easily spots abnormality by boosting incident detection, cyber resilience and threat vulnerability prioritization since it continuously learns the unique digital fingerprint of a business in real time, according to Nicole Carignan (pictured), vice president of strategic cyber AI at Darktrace Holdings Ltd.

Darktrace’s Nicole Carignan talks to theCUBE about how Darktrace AI is leading the advanced cyber defense charge.

“We already have an incredible unsupervised machine learning engine that understands the entire digital estate across multiple domains,” Carignan said. “We use graph theory with infection-based modeling to understand which assets are the most exposed, vulnerable, damaging or critical, and prioritizing that to nest hardening mitigations. We had two customers who were observing anomalous activity on their Palo Alto firewalls because we had such a great technical integration with them.”

Carignan spoke with theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson at the Black Hat USA event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why continuous learning is crucial for enhanced cyber resilience, as evidenced by Darktrace AI. 

Curbing deepfakes with Darktrace AI

It is fundamental to recognize that humans cannot be the last line of defense when it comes to deepfakes. This is because a National Institutes of Health study showed that humans have a 50% accuracy of detecting deepfake imagery, presenting a strong case for machine-learning tools, such as Darktrace AI, Carignan stated.

“We really need to facilitate the use of targeted machine learning techniques that could be accomplished at detecting anomalous behavior,” she said. “There are RNNs and CNNs, neural networks that can be trained on pattern recognition of facial signals and biological signals that could help facilitate the detection of deepfakes. We can’t rely on humans to be that defense, we need to augment them with machine learning techniques and detection.”

Cyber crime as a service continues to explode as showcased by Darktrace’s latest threat report. As a result, it will take a growing arsenal of defensive AI to effectively protect organizations in the age of offensive AI, making Darktrace AI important, according to Carignan. 

“Third year in a row, cyber crime-as-a-service, ransomware-as-a-service, malware-as-a-service were the highest,” she stated. “We’re starting to see this global shift across different countries, where they’re starting to regulate whether or not you can pay ransoms anymore. This is going to drastically impact the economic ecosystem for financially motivated threat actors.”

Phishing attacks’ efficacy and volume are growing exponentially. This is because threat actors are using more sophisticated tactics, techniques and procedures designed to evade traditional security parameters, Carignan pointed out. 

“We saw in the first six months of this year over 17 million phishing emails across our customer fleet,” she explained. “Thirty three percent of them had very sophisticated social engineering to include multiple types of phishing that go well beyond the inbox-like teams phishing, dropbox phishing, QR phishing.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Black Hat USA event: 

Photo: SiliconANGLE