The cybersecurity industry is trying to gravitate from playing defense to a game plan that relies more on offense.

The move has been dictated in large part by the use of AETs or advanced evasion techniques by cybercriminals to avoid detection in breaches and attacks. These sophisticated tools have prompted a similar response from the cybersecurity industry as the arms race for protecting vital networks and systems continues.

“We’ve seen a rise in sophistication; the adversaries are not slowing down,” said Derek Manky (pictured, right), chief of security insights and global threat analysis at Fortinet Inc., who described how his company and others in the security world are responding. “We’re not relying on blogs anymore and 40- to 50-page whitepapers. We’re actually looking at playbooks now, mapping our adversaries, understanding their tools, techniques and procedures.”

Manky spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed industry adoption of machine-learning solutions to bolster security and the danger posed by the implementation of 5G networks. (* Disclosure below.)

Move to localized learning

The security industry is moving from a generation of security tools that examine pattern recognition and utilize sensors within networks to a more advanced model that will rely on edge computing and artificial-intelligence processing tools at the connected device level.

“We’ll have localized learning nodes that are actually processing and learning,” Manky said. “You can think of them as mini brains. We refer to this as federated machine learning in our industry.”

Advances in technology are also going to raise the stakes as cybercriminals leverage new tools to take advantage of more robust networks set to come online with the deployment of the new 5G wireless standard.

“If we think about the weaponization of 5G, that’s a very large problem,” said Manky, who raised the prospect of “swarm networks” wreaking havoc in the digital world. “It’s the idea of a bunch of devices that can connect to each other, share intelligence and then act to do something like a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack. That’s absolutely in the realm of possibility when it comes to the weaponization of 5G.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE