The Security Imperative in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming industries and everyday life, driving innovations once relegated to the realm of science fiction into modern reality. As AI technologies grow more integral to complex systems like autonomous vehicles, healthcare diagnostics, and automated financial trading platforms, the imperative for robust security measures increases exponentially.

Securing AI is not only about safeguarding data but also about ensuring the core systems — in particular, the trained models that really put the “intelligence” in AI — function as intended without malicious interference. Historical lessons from earlier technologies offer some guidance and can be used to inform today’s strategies for securing AI systems. Here, we’ll explore the evolution, current state, and future direction of AI security, with a focus on why it’s essential to learn from the past, secure the present, and plan for a resilient future.

AI: The Newest Crown Jewel

Security in the context of AI is paramount precisely because AI systems increasingly handle sensitive data, make important, autonomous decisions, and operate with limited supervision in critical environments where safety and confidentiality are key. As AI technologies burrow further into sectors like healthcare, finance, and national security, the potential for misuse or harmful consequences due to security shortcomings rises to concerning levels. Several factors drive the criticality of AI security:

• Data Sensitivity: AI systems process and learn from large volumes of data, including personally identifiable information, proprietary business information, and other sensitive data types. Ensuring the security of enterprise training data as it passes to and through AI models is crucial to maintaining privacy, regulatory compliance, and the integrity of intellectual property.
• System Integrity: The integrity of AI systems themselves must be well defended in order to prevent malicious alterations or tampering that could lead to bogus outputs and incorrect decisions. In autonomous vehicles or medical diagnosis systems, for example, instructions issued by compromised AI platforms could have life-threatening consequences.
• Operational Reliability: AI is increasingly finding its way into critical infrastructure and essential services. Therefore, ensuring these systems are secure from attacks is vital for maintaining their reliability and functionality in critical operations.
• Matters of Trust: For AI to be widely adopted, users and stakeholders must trust that the systems are secure and will function as intended without causing unintended harm. Security breaches or failures can undermine public confidence and hinder the broader adoption of emerging AI technologies over the long haul.
• Adversarial Activity: AI systems are uniquely susceptible to certain attacks, whereby slight manipulations in inputs — sometimes called prompt hacking — can deceive an AI system into making incorrect decisions or spewing malicious output. Understanding the capabilities of malicious actors and building robust defenses against such prompt-based attacks is crucial for the secure deployment of AI technologies.

In short, security in AI isn’t just about protecting data. It’s also about ensuring safe, reliable, and ethical use of AI technologies across all applications. These inexorably nested requirements continue to drive research and ongoing development of advanced security measures tailored to the unique challenges posed by AI.

Looking Back: Historical Security Pitfalls

We don’t have to turn the clock back very far to witness new, vigorously hyped technology solutions wreaking havoc on the global cybersecurity risk register. Consider the peer-to-peer recordkeeping database mechanism known as blockchain.  When blockchain exploded into the zeitgeist circa 2008 — alongside the equally disruptive concept of cryptocurrency — its introduction brought great excitement thanks to its potential for both decentralization of data management and the promise of enhanced data security. In short order, however, events such as the DAO hack —an exploitation of smart contract vulnerabilities that led to substantial, if temporary, financial losses — demonstrated the risk of adopting new technologies without diligent security vetting.

As a teaching moment, the DAO incident highlights several issues: the complex interplay of software immutability and coding mistakes; and the disastrous consequences of security oversights in decentralized systems. The case study teaches us that with every innovative leap, a thorough understanding of the new security landscape is crucial, especially as we integrate similar technologies into AI-enabled systems.

Historical analysis of other emerging technology failures over the years reveals other common themes, such as overreliance on untested technologies, misjudgment of the security landscape, and underestimation of cyber threats. These pitfalls are exacerbated by hype-cycle-powered rapid adoption that often outstrips current security capacity and capabilities. For AI, these themes underscore the need for a security-first approach in development phases, continuous vulnerability assessments, and the integration of robust security frameworks from the outset.

Current State of AI Security

With AI solutions now pervasive, each use case introduces unique security challenges. Be it predictive analytics in finance, real-time decision-making systems in manufacturing systems, or something else entirely,  each application requires a tailored security approach that takes into account the specific data types and operational environments involved. It’s a complex landscape where rapid technological advancements run headlong into evolving security concerns. Key features of this challenging  infosec environment include:

• Advanced Threats: AI systems face a range of sophisticated threats, including data poisoning, which can skew an AI’s learning and reinforcement processes, leading to flawed outputs; model theft, in which proprietary intellectual property is exposed; and other adversarial actions that can manipulate AI perceptions and decisions in unexpected and harmful ways. These threats are unique to AI and demand specialized security responses that go beyond traditional cybersecurity controls.
• Regulatory and Compliance Issues: With statutes such as GDPR in Europe, CCPA in the U.S., and similar data security and privacy mandates worldwide, technology purveyors and end users alike are under increased pressure to prioritize safe data handling and processing. On top of existing privacy rules, the Biden administration in the U.S. issued a comprehensive executive order last October establishing new standards for AI safety and security. In Europe, meanwhile, the EU’s newly adopted Artificial Intelligence Act provides granular guidelines for dealing with AI-related risk. This spate of new rules can often clash with AI-enabled applications that demand more and more access to data without much regard for its origin or sensitivity.
• Integration Challenges: As AI becomes more integrated into critical systems across a wide swath of vertical industries, ensuring security coherence across different platforms and blended technologies remains a significant challenge. Rapid adoption and integration expose modern AI systems to traditional threats and legacy network vulnerabilities, compounding the risk landscape.
• Explainability: As adoption grows, the matter of AI explainability  — or the ability to understand and interpret the decisions made by AI systems — becomes increasingly important. This concept is crucial in building trust, particularly in sensitive fields like healthcare where decisions can have profound impacts on human lives.Consider an AI system used to diagnose disease from medical imaging. If such a system identifies potential tumors in a scan, clinicians and patients must be able to understand the basis of these conclusions to trust in their reliability and accuracy. Without clear explanations, hesitation to accept the AI’s recommendations ensues, leading to delays in treatment or disregard of useful AI-driven insights. Explainability not only enhances trust, it also ensures AI tools can be effectively integrated into clinical workflows, providing clear guidance that healthcare professionals can evaluate alongside their own expertise.

Addressing such risks requires a deep understanding of AI operations and the development of specialized security techniques such as differential privacy, federated learning, and robust adversarial training methods. The good news here: In response to AI’s risk profile, the field of AI security research and development is on a steady growth trajectory. Over the past 18 months the industry has witnessed  increased investment aimed at developing new methods to secure AI systems, such as encryption of AI models, robustness testing, and intrusion detection tailored to AI-specific operations.

At the same time, there’s also rising awareness of AI security needs beyond the boundaries of cybersecurity organizations and infosec teams. That’s led to better education and training for application developers and users, for example, on the potential risks and best practices for securing A-powered systems.

Overall,  enterprises at large have made substantial progress in identifying and addressing AI-specific risk, but significant challenges remain, requiring ongoing vigilance, innovation, and adaptation in AI defensive strategies.

Data Classification and AI Security

One area getting a fair bit of attention in the context of safeguarding AI-capable environments is effective data classification. The ability to earmark data (public, proprietary, confidential, etc.) is essential for good AI security practice. Data classification ensures that sensitive information is handled appropriately within AI systems. Proper classification aids in compliance with regulations and prevents sensitive data from being used — intentionally or unintentionally — in training datasets that can be targets for attack and compromise.

The inadvertent inclusion of personally identifiable information (PII) in model training data, for example, is a hallmark of poor data management in an AI environment. A breach in such systems not only compromises privacy but exposes organizations to profound legal and reputational damage as well. Organizations in the business of adopting AI to further their business strategies must be ever aware of the need for stringent data management protocols and advanced data anonymization techniques before data enters the AI processing pipeline.

The Future of AI Security: Navigating New Horizons

As AI continues to evolve and tunnel its way further into every facet of human existence, securing these systems from potential threats, both current and future, becomes increasingly critical. Peering into AI’s future, it’s clear that any promising new developments in AI capabilities must be accompanied by robust strategies to safeguard systems and data against the sophisticated threats of tomorrow.

The future of AI security will depend heavily on our ability to anticipate potential security issues and tackle them proactively before they escalate. Here are some ways security practitioners can prevent future AI-related security shortcomings:

• Continuous Learning and Adaptation: AI systems can be designed to learn from past attacks and adapt to prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future. This involves using machine learning algorithms that evolve continuously, enhancing their detection capabilities over time.
• Enhanced Data Privacy Techniques: As data is the lifeblood of AI, employing advanced and emerging data privacy technologies such as differential privacy and homomorphic encryption will ensure that data can be used for training without exposing sensitive information.
• Robust Security Protocols: Establishing rigorous security standards and protocols from the initial phases of AI development will be crucial. This includes implementing secure coding practices, regular security audits, and vulnerability assessments throughout the AI lifecycle.
• Cross-Domain Collaboration: Sharing knowledge and strategies across industries and domains can lead to a more robust understanding of AI threats and mitigation strategies, fostering a community approach to AI security.

Looking Further Ahead

Beyond the immediate horizon, the field of AI security is set to witness several meaningful advancements:

• Autonomous Security: AI systems capable of self-monitoring and self-defending against potential threats will soon become a reality. These systems will autonomously detect, analyze, and respond to threats in real time, greatly reducing the window for attacks.
• Predictive Security Models: Leveraging big data and predictive analytics, AI can forecast potential security threats before they manifest. This proactive approach will allow organizations to implement defensive measures in advance.
• AI in Cybersecurity Operations: AI will increasingly become both weapon and shield. AI is already being used to enhance cybersecurity operations, providing the ability to sift through massive amounts of data for threat detection and response at a speed and accuracy unmatchable by humans. The technology and its underlying methodologies will only get better with time. This ability for AI to remove the so-called “human speed bump” in incident detection and response will take on greater importance as the adversaries themselves increasingly leverage AI to generate malicious attacks that are at once faster, deeper, and potentially more damaging than ever before.
• Decentralized AI Security Frameworks: With the rise of blockchain technology, decentralized approaches to AI security will likely develop. These frameworks can provide transparent and tamper-proof systems for managing AI operations securely.
• Ethical AI Development: As part of securing AI, strong initiatives are gaining momentum to ensure that AI systems are developed with ethical considerations in mind will prevent biases and ensure fairness, thus enhancing security by aligning AI operations with human values.

As with any rapidly evolving technology, the journey toward a secure AI-driven future is complex and fraught with challenges. But with concerted effort and prudent innovation, it’s entirely within our grasp to anticipate and mitigate these risks effectively. As we advance, the integration of sophisticated AI security controls will not only protect against potential threats, it will foster trust and promote broader adoption of this transformative technology. The future of AI security is not just about defense but about creating a resilient, reliable foundation for the growth of AI across all sectors.

Charting a Path Forward in AI Security

Few technologies in the past generation have held the promise for world-altering innovation in the way AI has. Few would quibble with AI’s immense potential to disrupt and benefit human pursuits from healthcare to finance, from manufacturing to national security and beyond. Yes, Artificial Intelligence is revolutionary. But it’s not without cost. AI comes with its own inherent collection of vulnerabilities that require vigilant, innovative defenses tailored to their unique operational contexts.

As we’ve discussed, embracing sophisticated, proactive, ethical, collaborative AI security and privacy measures is the only way to ensure we’re not only safeguarding against potential threats but also fostering trust to promote the broader adoption of what most believe is a brilliantly transformative technology.

The journey towards a secure AI-driven future is indeed complex and fraught with obstacles. However, with concerted effort, continuous innovation, and a commitment to ethical practices, successfully navigating these impediments is well within our grasp. As AI continues to evolve, so too must our strategies for defending it. 

-- Gunter Ollmann

First Published: IOActive Blog - May 30, 2024

It’s Time for Security Analytics to Embrace the Age of Science Over Art

Security analytics has traditionally been approached with a “hunt and peck” mentality, which has made the process of uncovering and responding to cyberthreats more art than science. A human analyst has an idea of what they are looking for when they begin to hunt across the available data, performing that task based on their own experience. They’ve been taught to celebrate when they find something, and that the trickier and more obscure the discovery, the greater the celebration of their skills.

This situation is, I believe, an “art” because the results will always differ between analysts — the day of the week, what they had for breakfast, or how their weekend went — and there are too many outside factors that can affect the individual doing the hunting. The situation has only been perpetuated by an industry that has for too long touted the value of this “art.”

We’re no longer working with a simple canvas

We’ve all heard it before and will continue to hear it — data volumes and the enterprise landscape have been growing exponentially and that’s not going to stop. This was put into hyperdrive with the rapid adoption of cloud computing, which challenges organizations to collect and analyze complete data from multiple sources, including new cloud data as well as from legacy, on-premises infrastructures. This has resulted in limited visibility that ultimately compromises overall security.

What we’re not hearing enough is that applying to this challenge the long-held belief in the “art” of hunt-and-peck doesn’t scale and isn’t a reliable or repeatable process that can come close to meeting the needs of modern enterprise environments.

Managing haystacks of needles

We all know the saying “finding a needle in a haystack.” But in today’s threat landscape, given the data volumes with which analysts are burdened, it’s more like finding the sharpest needle in a haystack of needles. Following the decades-old mantra of “assume breach,” we need to turn our focus to the threats that matter most — the sharpest needles. This requires operationalizing the hunt, triage, investigation and response by removing humans from being “artistic” speed bumps and instead empowering them with the science of protection embedded in security analytics.

Adopting the science of security analytics that leverages automation built on machine learning and AI enables repeatable, reliable streaming investigations of threats across all the data, at all times. Applying this method will reveal orders of magnitude more threats and incidents — across a broad spectrum of risk — occurring continuously within the enterprise. We’ve reached the tipping point where threat volumes have far exceeded what any number of human analysts could reasonably hunt/triage, let alone respond to. This means enterprise security teams must increasingly apply AI and ML to the management of the threats they find (i.e., managing those stacks of needles) as well as the mitigations and responses.

Reprieve begins with automation

Building processes that are autonomous is the critical element to embracing a scientific approach to protection. While past security solutions focused on automation, they were largely unsuccessful due to inflexibility and reliance upon humans to choose the right automation steps in advance of applying them for every exception. This is not the role people should be playing when it comes to successfully implementing autonomous solutions, and it doesn’t do anything to lighten their load. Instead, autonomous solutions should deploy system “smartness” to fill in the blanks and know to ask for human guidance when it’s actually needed.

If we continue with the mantra of “assume breach,” and operationalize security as described above, we also must completely rethink the human-focused SOC solution of filtering alerts. With people having been swamped to the point of (and beyond) alert fatigue, the solution has been to drastically manage the funnel of events and alerts, thus reducing the aperture of enterprise threat visibility and response — none of which sounds like a solution to me.

It begs the question: Why bother collecting alerts and events in the first place if you’re only going to do something with 1% of the top 1% most critical alerts? My response: Filtering is the worst way to manage security.

Instead, let’s do this:

With modern AI and autonomous hunting and triaging solutions, the system can look at every event and alert as it streams by and correlate, question and enrich them all in real time — all the time. The more data collected the more accurate and useful the autonomous system becomes, improving its ability to identify the collective stories and present them to the business and the analysts. To take it a step further, the autonomous system can then, in most cases, perform autonomous responses to the threats being found.

Human and machine harmony

Anytime automation in security is discussed it brings up the fear of automating away the analyst. But with a science-first approach, they aren’t going anywhere. The human analyst role is transforming, which will be a huge benefit to the people who work in SOCs. By adopting a scientific method for security analytics, the analyst will influence and guide the autonomous system to ensure it delivers business impact and value:

• For exceptions when the AI doesn’t have enough information or confidence to provide an autonomous response, it watches and learns how the human analyst does or did it, thus building and establishing a scientific methodology.
• At the cloud-SaaS level, those learnings may come from hundreds of enterprise SOC teams and thousands of expert security analysts, from which the AI systems can take collective intelligence and apply those learnings and methodology refinements back into the hands of the individual analyst.

The final result? The loop gets closed. The analyst is augmented.

The autonomous system deals with the daily grind, identifies the gaps that require human expertise, learns by watching how humans fill in the methodology gaps, and reapplies those learnings collectively. For instance, assume that a security team is capable of performing 100 manual investigations per day. An autonomous system could ask millions of forensic questions in a day. Time to resolution is shortened by augmenting the work the analyst does. The autonomous system performs repetitive, data-intensive work, it can quickly go back in time and ask an infinite number of questions, and the efficiency benefits just go on and on.

Leading with science will equip security analysts with actionable data across use cases ranging from threat detection, threat investigation, and threat hunting to ransomware investigation and incident response. It helps security teams work smarter and respond faster while boosting productivity and strengthening security.

-- Gunter Ollmann

First Published: Medium - September 8, 2022

Security 101: Machine Learning and Big Data

 The other week I was invited to keynote at the ISSA CISO Forum on Incident Response in Dallas and in the weeks prior to it I was struggling to decide upon what angle I should take. Should I be funny, irreverent, diplomatic, or analytical? Should I plaster slides with the last quarter’s worth of threat statistics, breach metrics, and headline news? Should I quip some anecdote and hope the attending CISO’s would have an epiphany that’ll fundamentally change the way they secure their organizations?

In the end I did none of that… instead I decided to pull apart the latest batch of security buzzwords – “Big Data” and “Machine Learning”.

If you attended RSA USA (or any major security vendor/booth conference) this year you can’t have missed the fact that everything from Antivirus through to USB memory sticks now come with a dab of big data, a sprinkling of machine learning, and a dollop of cloud for good measure. Thankfully I’m a cynic; or else I’d have been thrashing around on the ground in an epileptic fit from all the flashy marketing claims and trademarked nonsense phrases.

I guess I’m lucky to be in the position of having had several years of exposure to some of the greatest minds at Georgia Tech as they drummed in to me on a daily basis the “what and how” of machine learning in the context of solving many of today’s toughest security problems.

So, it was with that in mind that I thought “If I’m a CISO and everything I know about machine learning and big data came from carefully rehearsed vendor sound bites and glossy pamphlets, would I be able to tell the difference between Chanel #5 and cow manure?” The obvious answer would result in some very happy farmers.

What was the net result of this self-inflection and impending deadline? I crafted a short presentation for CISO’s… a 101 course on machine learning and big data… and it included ducks.

If you’re in the upper tiers of your organization and you’ve had sales folks pimping you their latest cloud-infused, big data-munching, machine learning, and world-hunger-solving security solution, please carry on reading as I attempt to explain the basics of the latest and greatest in buzzwords…

First of all – some context! In the world of breach detection and incident response there’s a common idiom: “If it walks like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck… it must be a duck.”

Now I could easily spend another 5,000 words explaining why such an idiom doesn’t apply to modern security threats, targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats, but you’ll have to wait for a different blog post. Rather, for this 101 lesson, it’s important to understand the concept of “Feature Selection” – which in the case of this idiom includes: walking, flying and quacking.

If you’ve been tasked with dealing with a duck problem, ideally you’d be an aficionado on the feet, wings and sounds of ducks. You’d be able to apply this knowledge to each bird you have the time to focus your attention on and make a determination: Duck, or Not a Duck. As a security professional, you’d be versed in the various attributes of certain threats – and able to derive a conclusion as to the nature of the security problem.

The problem though is that at scale things break down.

What do you do when there’s too many to analyze, when time is too short, and when you can’t make out all the duck features from afar? This is typical of the big data problem (and your everyday network traffic). Storing the data is the easy part. Retrieving the data is mechanically complicated, but solvable.

Meanwhile, making decisions and taking actions upon the data is typically the most difficult part. With every doubling of data, your problem grows exponentially.

The traditional method of dealing with the situation has been to employ signature matching systems. In essence, we build rules based upon the features we’ve previously identified as significant and capable of bounding the problem (or duck selection). We then compare these rules against the sample animal and receive a binary answer – Duck, or Not a Duck.

Signature systems can be very efficient at classification. Just look at your average Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). A problem though lies in the scope of the features that had been defined.

If those features (or parameters) used for classification are too narrow (or too broad) then evasion is not only probable, but guaranteed. In essence, for a threat (or duck) to be classified, it must have been observed in the past or carefully predicted (although rare).

From an attacker’s perspective, knowledge of those features and triggering parameters makes it a trivial task to evade or to conduct false flag operations. Just think – hunters do this all the time with their floating duck decoys. Even fellow duck hunters have been known to mistakenly take pot-shots at them too.

Switching pace a little, let’s look at the network a little.

The big green blob is all the network traffic for an organization for a week. The red blog right-of-center is traffic associated with an active breach, and the lighter red blob with the dotted lines are just general malicious traffic observed within the network. In this two-dimensional view (if I hadn’t color-coded it previously) you’d have a near impossible task differentiating between them. As it is, the malicious traffic is mixed with both the “safe” and “breach” traffic.

The trick in differentiating between the network traffic types lies in increasing the dimensionality of the problem. What was a two-dimensional blob suddenly becomes much clearer when an appropriate view or perspective to the data is added. In the context of the above diagram, the addition of a z-axis and an extension in to the third-dimension allows the observer (i.e. analyst) to easily differentiate between the traffic types – for example, the axis could represent “country code of destination IP address”. In this context, the appropriate feature selection can greatly simplify the detection problem. Choosing appropriate features is important – nay, it’s critical!

This is where advances in machine learning over the last half-decade have really come to the fore in computer science and more recently in information security.

Without getting in to any of the math behind the various machine learning algorithms or techniques, the key concept you need to understand is “training”. It can mean many things to many a mathematician, but since we’re likely not one of those, what training means in our context is that we already have samples of what we’re going to be looking for, and samples of things we know we’re definitely not interested in. The better we define and populate these training sets, the more precise the machine learning system we’re employing will be in differentiating between them – and potentially classifying other contenders.

So, in this example we’ve taken a bunch of ducks and grouped them together. They become our “+ve class” – which basically means these are the things we’re interested in. But, equally important, is our “-ve class” – our collection of things we know not to be ducks. In many cases our -ve class may be more important than our +ve class because it contains all those false positives and “nearly” ducks – the things that may have caught us out once before.

One function of a good machine learning system is to automatically determine which attributes make the most sense in differentiating between your +ve and -ve classes.

While our poor old hunter (or analyst) was working with three features – walks, flies, and talks – the computer-based system may have reviewed all the attributes that were available and determined which ones are the most useful in differentiating between “ducks” and “not ducks”. In many cases the system will have weighted the various features (or attributes) to indicate which features are more deterministic of the classes.

For example, texture may be a good indicator of “not a duck” – since none of the +ve class were made from plastic or wood. Meanwhile features such as “wing length” may not be such a good criteria and will be weighted in a way to not have an influence on determining whether a duck is a duck or not – or may be dropped by the system entirely.

The number of features reviewed, assessed and weighted by the machine learning system will eventually be determined by the type of data being used and how “rich” it is. For example, in the network security realm we may be feeding the system with collated samples of firewall logs, DNS traffic samples, IP blacklists/whitelists, IPS alerts, etc. It’s important to note though that the “richer” the data set (i.e. the more possible features there could be), the more complex the problem is for the computer to solve and the longer it’ll take to train the system.

Now let’s switch back to that “big data” we originally talked about. In the duck realm we’re talking about all the birds within a national park (say). Meanwhile, in the network security realm, we may be talking about all the traffic observed in real-time across a corporate network and all the alerting instrumentation (e.g. firewalls, IPS, etc.)

I’m going to do some hand-waving here because it can get rather complex and there’s a lot of proprietary tweaks that can be undertaken here… but in one representation we can get our trained system to automatically group and cluster events on our network.

Using our original training data, or some other previously labeled datasets, it’s possible to automatically label the clusters output by a machine learning system.

For example, in the graphic above we see a number of unique clusters (or blobs if you insist). Through automatic labeling we know that the green blobs are types of ducks, the red blobs are various groupings of not ducks, and the gray blobs are clusters of previously unknown or unlabeled clusters – each one mathematically distinct from the other – based upon the features the system chose.

What the system can also do is assign a probability that the unknown clusters are associated with our +ve or -ve training sets. For example, in this particular graphical representation the proximity of the unlabeled clusters to labeled (and classified) clusters allows the system to assign a probability of whether the cluster is a duck or not a duck – even though the system had never seen these things before (i.e. “birds” the system hasn’t encountered before).

The next (and near final) stage is to manually label these new clusters. For example, we ask an ornithologist to look at each cluster of “ducks” and “not ducks” in turn and to label them… “rubber duckies”, “robot duckies”, and “Madagascar mallard ducks”.

Then, to improve our machine learning system further, we add these newly labeled clusters to our +ve and -ve training sets… and the system continues to learn and become more precise over time.

In addition, since we’ve now labeled these clusters, in the future we’re able to automatically flag new additions to these clusters and correctly label the duck (or threat).

And, if we’re a really smart CISO, we can use this clustering system (and labeled clusters) to automatically alert us to new threats or to initiate automatic network security actions – e.g. enable blocking of a new malicious URL, stop blocking a new cloud service delivering official updates to applications, etc.

The application of machine learning techniques to the toughest security problems facing business today has come along in leaps and bounds recently. However as with any buzz word that falls in to the hands of marketers and gets manipulated until it squeaks and glitters, or oozes onto every product in this year’s price list, senior technical staff need to take added care not to be bamboozled by well-practiced but meaningless word salad.

A little understanding of the concepts behind big data and machine learning can not only cut through the latest batch of sales promises, but can also form the basis of constructing a new generation of meaningful breach detection and incident response solutions.

-- Gunter Ollmann

Original Publication: IOActive Blog - May 29, 2013