AI is influencing big time in our daily life and could bring respite in the space of cybersecurity

When we talk about artificial intelligence it brings the pictures of robots and machines in our mind. Surprisingly AI has already become a part and parcel of our daily lives and the reality is this technology will enhance us. All intelligent personal assistants like Siri, Google Now and Cortana are available on various platforms which help to find useful information when we ask with our own voice. Artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in retrieving the data and further using the information to deliver best results.

We have seen the e-commerce industry is highly dependent on predicting the purchases by the consumers. Amazon is developing an anticipatory shipping project which forecasts to send the items to the customers. This will completely eliminate the need for a last-minute visit to online stores. On the other hand, offline stores also work in a similar way. When customers visit them, sometimes they are awarded coupons which have been selected in accord with predictive analytics algorithms.

Secondly, we all receive emails or statements regarding the use of our debit/credit card at a specific point of sale. Most of the banks send these messages to reduce the chances of fraudulence in the account. AI is the technology deployed to monitor fraudulency. In most of the cases, algorithms are given a large sample of fraudulent and non-fraudulent purchases and asked to look for signs that a transaction falls into one category or another. After repetitive processes, systems will be able to spot a fraudulent transaction based on the indicators it had learned through a previous training exercise.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes all-pervasive, a new report forecasts that technology would replace humans by 2030 in the field of cybersecurity, as hackers use more sophisticated tools. Just 9% of respondents said AI would not replace their job within the next decade. Nearly a third (32%) said AI would eventually work to completely automate all cybersecurity. Nearly one in five (19%) believe that attackers using AI to enhance their arsenal would be commonplace by 2025. Cybersecurity will help enterprises, governments and ordinary users adapt safely to these new conditions in 2021. Nearly one in five of those surveyed said attackers using AI to enhance their goals would be commonplace by 2025. Nearly a quarter of IT leaders also claimed that by 2030, data access would be tied to biometric or DNA data, making unauthorised access impossible.

This year telecommuting would continue and hybrid environments where work and personal tasks co-mingle in one machine, would be challenging in terms of security. Organisations — especially global enterprises — will have less control over their data. Delineating where data is stored and processed will become more difficult. The decreased visibility into enterprise devices only gets more problematic when employees access personal apps from work devices," said a report titled "Turning the Tide". Both users and enterprises would have to protect work-from-home setups from threats and IT teams would need to secure entire remote workforces and individual users would have to secure their virtual workspaces and endpoint devices in 2021.

The number of Covid-19-related spam emails and phishing attempts are increasing. "Cybercriminals will continue to use the coronavirus and other related incidents from the pandemic's fallout to lure in new victims. Going forward, the rollout of superfast 5G and the explosion of IoT, promises to become the reality

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief editor, VARINDIA