Since its invention in 1970, email has undergone very little changes.
Simultaneously, it has become the most targeted intrusion point for cybercriminals, with devastating outcomes.
When initially envisioned, email was built for connectivity.
Today, however, it is naively easy to spoof an email and impersonate others.
Last year, 70 percent of organizations reported they had become victims of advanced phishing attacks.
The problem is not lack of awareness, but rather misinformation.
Human operators are not enough either.
Hackers useDistributed Spam Distractionandpolymorphic attacksto stress out operators and cloak their malicious actions.
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So far, onlyartificial intelligencehas been able to cope with all the above attack scenarios.
How AI rewrites the rules of email protection
Phishing attacks are much likeapplication-basedzero-day hacks.
Inapplication-basedzero-day attacks, hackers discover and exploit an unknown vulnerability in a specific software to infiltrate a system.
AI has the capability to go beyond signature detection and dynamically self-learn mailbox, and communication habits.
Anything predictable will be automated by AI, leaving the human worker to handle exceptional situations.
AI also can move beyond detecting blacklisted URLs.
Another advantage of AI is its ability to scan disparate systems and detect patterns.
Its important to stress that AI should never be conceived as a silver bullet.
A system is only complete if it can efficiently involve humans in the loop.
These operators can make the system smarter by detecting edge cases, from which the AI learns.
Simultaneously, AIs learning capabilities spares the operators from repeatedly dealing with similar incidents.
By creating a democratized system for incident reporting and resolving, we can share incidents across organizations.
Such system can defeat phishing attacks at scale.
And with the AI being trained on the same repository, deviations and polymorphic attacks can be automatically detected.
As AI detects patterns instead of hard-wired signatures, hackers find it extremely difficult to disguise their operations.
Emails strength lies in its simplicity, and the ability to connect to perfect strangers.
This strength is also an emails greatest weakness when it comes to cybersecurity.
He has a deep knowledge in cybersecurity, malware, and social engineering, and is an open-source advocate.
