How MIT Is Teaching AI To Detect Cyberattacks And Defeat Hackers With 86% Accuracy

How MIT Is Teaching AI To Detect Cyberattacks And Defeat Hackers With 86% Accuracy

Detecting a cyberattack and its mitigation is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses. Sniffing through all the data and looking for the possible cause can take hours. To solve this problem, MIT is developing an AI that can work with humans without getting tired.

Known as AI², this system is developed by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Each day it scan 3.6 billion log lines and looks for something suspicious. Currently, it identifies about 86 percent of attacks.

This prediction is far better — about three times — than the existing systems as it continuously learns from human experts. The system is also known to reduce the number of false positives by a factor of 5.

It clusters the data into meaningful patterns and then sends its findings to human analysts who identify which events are actual attacks.

If you’re willing to know about the story behind the name AI², well, it’s a combination of artificial intelligence and what the researchers call ‘analyst intuition’.