With rapidly changing market conditions, new, disruptive technologies, and ongoing regulatory shifts, the pressure on enterprises to manage cybersecurity risk and the importance of proactive management cannot be overstated. However, the ability to understand and react to these risks with under-resourced teams and siloed decision-making is a tall order for any enterprise. Improving processes and implementing technologies alone are no longer enough to combat this ever-growing complexity. Careful application of innovations, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents an opportunity in the sea of growing cybersecurity and threat data.  AI can assist your teams with processing large amounts of information. With properly trained large learning models (LLMS), AI could help identify patterns within the data sets, potentially transforming risk identification and mitigation.

Cybersecurity Risk Identification

Identifying cybersecurity risk is an enormous task for any enterprise. Cybersecurity teams must consider vast amounts of data, systems, applications, networks, and multiple functional areas while considering the impact on various stakeholders. Combining AI with solid processes and human oversight, cybersecurity risk identification can become far more efficient and effective. AI’s impact includes: 

AI could effectively streamline data processing, allowing the ability to quickly analyze structured and unstructured data sources. Processing data and pattern recognition is no longer a monumental, time-consuming task. Additionally, multiple data sources can be consolidated across the organization, giving a full view of organizational risk across the enterprise.

The development of LLMs is ideal for training cybersecurity risk prediction models, as large amounts of data are used to identify patterns and make accurate risk forecasts. Models include supervised techniques (regression and decision trees) and unsupervised techniques such as data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment.

Using AI to help form anomaly detection models and identify early warning signs could relieve the heavy burden on security operations teams by continuously monitoring for emerging risks and alerting them to threats.

Cybersecurity Risk Mitigation

AI could be an excellent opportunity for identifying potential cybersecurity risks before they can be exploited. Through automated risk scoring supported by LLMs designed to find and test for vulnerabilities, configuration errors, and policy violations, along with ongoing system monitoring, security operations teams may be able to predict and mitigate issues before they become incidents. 

AI could also be an invaluable ally to overstressed and under-resourced security operations teams. It could be trained to execute some of the more mundane tasks of cybersecurity operations, such as triage while freeing up the team to work on higher-priority activities.

Considerations

AI is not a magic bullet for solving challenges as enterprises manage cybersecurity risk programs. Organizations must be cautious about data quality, model bias, and how AI solutions integrate with existing technologies and processes. AI should not be seen as a wholesale opportunity to replace human cybersecurity expertise. Rather, organizations should look to test and integrate AI with existing people, processes, and technologies. Doing so will maximize the positive impact while discovering deficiencies and ruling out laissez-faire applications.