Organisations likely to use AI extensively to deal with cyberattacks: Study

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will be powering the ‘cyber war rooms’ in organisations to help them protect from increasing cyberattacks, as well as detect, predict and respond to the same, a PwC India and Data Security Council of India (DSCI) study said.

The study titled ‘Cyber Security India Market: What lies beneath’ also notes that the regulatory landscape for privacy and data protection is expected to reach a tipping point in 2020, forcing Indian organisations to comply with not only global regulations but also with the proposed law on personal data protection, the Aadhaar Act.

“On the flip side, cyber attackers too would be weaponising AI/ML to initiate attacks with record speeds and precision,” it said, adding that businesses are expected to adopt tools and solutions embedded with AI/ML capabilities to keep threats and attacks at bay.

As per the study, almost all organisations will increase their expenditure on upgrading their security in their cloud environments because of the uniqueness of the threat actors on these systems.

“Organisations will be concerned to protect their cloud-based infrastructure and invest in people, processes and technology to fortify the layers of cloud-based networks, including insider threats,” said the joint study.

Further, there will be increased focus on adopting security operation centres to strengthen breach response capabilities, and organisations will leverage emerging tools and technologies with built-in AI/ML capabilities and regularly practice and refine their breach response plans.

As per the study, organisations will begin to recognise the fact that most of the breaches today start at the endpoint, allowing threat actors to sneak into the company networks. The number of endpoints (including mobile devices) continues to rise and so does the business data being processed/stored in them.

While threats like mobile malware seem to have a low direct impact on businesses, “we do see an increase in the number of data breaches related to mobile device use and misuse”, it added.

Every device used to access company systems is yet another endpoint for the organisation to secure. Organisations need to be careful and avoid deploying tools and solutions to solve an immediate problem or a single case.