Watson is the computer brain developed by IBM. UK based IT company Flair4IT is highlighting that Watson has now mastered ‘Jeopardy!”, which means that it has acquired new skills. Watson is trying to cure cancer, it can cook, and it is now able to hunt hackers as well.
IBM Security released a statement recently to highlight that their computer brain, ‘Watson’ has grown up even further. Watson is a computerized, cloud-based, cognitive technology and they have added cybersecurity to its list of skills. Watson will be flooded with security data and reports, provided to it from different global universities and IT companies.
According to Flair4it.co.uk, a UK based IT company who will be involved in the security flood, Watson will be able to process some 15,000 digital security related documents each month. This will include a wealth of information, ranging from videos to blog posts. This will enable the technology to understand everything there is to know about cybersecurity, which is a highly esoteric field.
Flair4IT employees who are working on this project will annotate a range of different documents. This will enable Watson to start interpreting the materials, coming up with its own conclusions. Ultimately, it is about addressing cybersecurity through big data. If successful, Watson will be able to automatically scan through the biggest collection of security research. As it is a computerized entity, it will be able to go above and beyond what any human operator will be able to achieve. It is impossible for a single human mind, or even a collective of human minds, to monitor every possible angle for every possible attack.
A representative from Flair4IT states: “What we are doing is creating an automated bounty hunter. At present, security practitioners simply cannot keep up with the sheer number of alerts they receive in terms of potential security threats, and that is just on their own network. They simply have not got the capacity to look at every single piece of data that comes in, particularly since so many are actually false positives. The result is that true positives are also missed.”
A number of reports have been released on the issue, and research has demonstrated that around 50% of the time that security staff uses to look through malware alerts is actually wasted. This is because the intelligence is inaccurate, or because the alarms are false. With some larger companies, this wasted time and effort can cost as much as £12,000 per week, a complete waste of resources in terms of both time and money.
Watson will be able to help with this, however. The computer will not be a replacement for the various members of staff, but it will be able to ensure that they are only exposed to the alerts that actually matter. As such, Watson will be the first point of contact, and it will be able to quickly sift through the information, remove false positives, and forward only that which really needs addressing. In so doing, real attacks should be able to be thwarted with greater ease, as well as enabling security staff to send out alerts to others about a new threat.
“The goal is to stop attacks as early as possible and then to share this information,” adds the Flair4IT representative. “In so doing, we are both on the defensive and on the offensive, collaborating and joining forces against a common threat. We’re also really happy to see that IBM has involved universities in this, because this means that the human talent will not be forgotten. At the end of the day, a computer is only as good as the human that operates it.”
