Even Machine Learning can’t be a silver bullet for cybersecurity

It is quiet ardent that each organisation handling customer interfacing has to handle the issue of cyber security on a priority basis. This has greatly increased the functioning of the security experts. Their very existence is based on cyber capability and robustness of cyber security. Enterprises help that business capability to deliver everything actually hinges on the capability of cyber security. Any hack brings those capabilities down the trust and loyalty to that particular brand.

The recent example in the city of Belgium, the process of ransomware has affected not only common people but also the government. It was a mega ransomware attack, for the whole government out of their senses on that particular point in time. The attack affected nearly 1 billion computers in the U.S. The attack was an outcome of lack of management for monitoring. In the history of cyber security it has been seen that ransomware attacks happened only in cases of a large number of public utilities are woven in the company. The money had to be paid due to the cyber incident. But there is no way to solve the problem. Government agencies, municipalities or private companies which are mostly public limited companies are hit by this kind of attack. However, Resilience is something which we are not working upon. A report says, Unfortunately, machine learning will never be a silver bullet for cybersecurity compared to image recognition or natural language processing (NLP), the two areas where machine learning is thriving. There will always be a man trying to find weaknesses in systems or ML algorithms to bypass security mechanisms. What’s worse, now hackers are able to use machine learning to carry out all their nefarious endeavors.

It is important to scrutinize how actually Artificial Intelligence (AI),Machine Learning (ML),and Deep Learning (DL) can help in cybersecurity right now, and what this hype is all about.

The year 2020 witnessed Covid-19 take over the real world as well as the cyberworld including Covid-related Scams and Ransomware. Now the cyber criminals began to promote mobile adware more heavily to younger audiences via popular social platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Fake news have spread during the pandemic, including fake news alleging that Bill Gates has created or financed the creation of Covid-19 in order to sell vaccines, and gain power over the world. Other examples of fake news during the pandemic include conspiracy theorists speculating democratic governments using the virus as an excuse to turn their systems into autocracies, and that 5G was responsible for the spread of the coronavirus.

Technology is evolving quickly, making it easier for deep fakes to be created, and the rate at which deep fakes can spread is also increasing due to social media. An experts states, nothing has to be real anymore”, meaning that people will believe fakes, especially when it comes to political deep fakes.

Deepfakes are taking off for the big time. Deepfakes, particularly pornographic deepfakes appeared in 2020, including explicit deepfakes of TikTok users. We advise people to stay extra conscious and cautious about what they see online and verify things they come across before trusting news, apps, links, sales offers, and even video content, as they could be manipulated.”

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA