Microsoft, Google Use Artificial Intelligence to Fight Hackers

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Last year, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure security team detected suspicious activity in the cloud computing usage of a large retailer: One of the company’s administrators, who usually logs on from New York, was trying to gain entry from Romania. And no, the admin wasn’t on vacation. A hacker had broken in.

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Chalk one up to a new generation of artificially intelligent software that adapts to hackers’ constantly evolving tactics. Microsoft, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and various startups are moving away from solely using older ‘rules-based’ technology designed to respond to specific kinds of intrusion and deploying machine-learning algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data on logins, behavior and previous attacks to ferret out and stop hackers.

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How Microsoft, Google use AI to fight hackers

‘Machine learning is a very powerful technique for security ‘ it’s dynamic, while rules-based systems are very rigid,’ says Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. ‘It’s a very manual intensive process to change them, whereas machine learning is automated, dynamic and you can retrain it easily.’

Hackers are themselves famously adaptable, of course, so they, too, could harness machine learning to create fresh mischief and overwhelm the new defences. For example, they could figure out how companies train their systems and use the data to evade or corrupt the algorithms. The big cloud services companies are painfully aware that the foe is a moving target but argue that the new technology will help tilt the balance in favour of the good guys.

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  • Publisher: TechCentral
  • Date: 2019-01-04T04:44:27+00:00
  • Twitter: @techcentral
  • Citation: Web link (Learn more)

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Scarlett Johansson on fake AI-generated sex videos: ‘Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image’

Scarlett Johansson is speaking out about the danger of computer-generated ‘deepfakes,’ in which women’s faces are inserted into explicit pornographic videos.

Johansson, 34, is one of the world’s highest-paid actresses, famous for roles in ‘The Avengers’ and the sci-fi fantasy ‘Her,’ in which she played the faceless voice of an artificial-intelligence companion.

And she has more experience than most with the dark reality of modern fame. In 2011, she was one of the celebrities whose nude photos were stolen and posted online by a hacker, making her the symbol for a shocking new era of privacy breaches. The hacker was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence in 2019

If we learned anything in 2018 it’s that algorithms and social platforms are under regulated, can easily be weaponized and that cybersecurity is an accelerating threat.

We learned that Huawei, a state sponsored technology company in China is considered a national security risk by the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Germany and maybe Canada and the United Kingdom.

We also learned that Google and Microsoft sell their services to the U.S. government, many times against the wishes of their own employees and best ethical judgement. The trend of putting profits over ethics and integrity is very dangerous for humanity.

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  • Publisher: Medium
  • Date: 2018-12-29T14:10:56.343Z
  • Author: Michael K Spencer
  • Twitter: @Medium
  • Citation: Web link (Learn more)

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