IBM announced Watson for Cyber Security, a new version of its cognitive computing system specializing in the field of information security. The company will partner with eight universities to expand the knowledge Watson was trained with in this field.
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo are the universities that will expand the Watson Cyber Security system training. Like the other versions of Watson, this one is designed on the IBM Cloud platform so it can work simultaneously with all of them.
The figures regarding information security problems are enormous. IBM mentioned a volume of more than 200,000 pieces of security events each day for an organization of average size. This involves a considerable amount of time taken by security staff to make the necessary checks with all the expenses related to these activities.
A world always connected has many benefits but also involves this multiplication of threats. The number of security events can seem really huge but it always depends on definitions because the repeated scanning by a very basic automated system is very different from a targeted attack by an expert.
To understand the issue, my little blogs can count several thousand attempted attacks every month. In my case, in almost all cases those are intrusion attempts that use brute force, therefore it’s easy to baffle them. A company that owns industrial secrets and other valuable data can be the subject of attacks not only in a higher volume but also more sophisticated.
The Watson for Cyber Security system will have to not only to take advantage of its ability to analyze huge amounts of data in a very short time to quickly recognize possible common attacks. It will also have to learn to understand what are called “unstructured data” that make up 80% of the data circulating on the Internet and include blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts and other information.
In essence, the point of implementing IBM Watson is due to the fact that this cognitive computing system can learn and become an expert in the field. In the case of Watson for Cyber Security it will have to learn to recognize the new threats that are created over time and therefore to implement new defensive strategies.
Computer security is more and more important with the growth of a connected world and at the gates the new Internet of Things revolution. All too often in recent times we read news about databases containing data of thousands of even millions of people that get stolen. It’s true that in many cases the weakest link in the security chain is made by human beings but if IBM Watson for Cyber Security can watch over with its superhuman skills it will be a big step forward for the systems under its protection.
