Trend Micro Ai Aibrownzdnet: Leading IT experts predict that AI will take over future cybersecurity roles due to demand for human-robot cooperation, according to a Trend Micro survey. The study polled 500 IT leaders about the state of cybersecurity in 2018. Four out of five respondents forecasted that AI will replace all cybersecurity roles by 2030 and nearly one-quarter say attackers using AI will be commonplace by 2025.
“As cybersecurity threats evolve, IT leaders are leaning on AI to help them stay ahead of the curve,” said creator and Trend Micro Chief Strategy Officer Jih-Chuan Ho, in a Feb. 21 statement. “AI will replace the traditional cybersecurity roles of analysts, investigators and incident responders as they can more effectively spot patterns, root out deception and create solutions to mitigate risk. As AI becomes more common in daily operations, organizations will start to realize the potential to cut costs, enhance productivity and rely more on automation to analyze and detect suspicious activity.”
Nearly one-third of the IT leads polled in the study said AI could even automate an entire cybersecurity function such as incident response. The most common job functions forecasted to be replaced by AI are malware analysis (84%) and threat intelligence creation (74%). The new role of chief data officer (20%) was also mentioned by a number of respondents.
Nearly two-thirds of the IT leaders polled said risk management is their biggest cybersecurity challenge. The top three threats cited as leading to time-consuming incidents include external attackers exploiting unprotected APIs (50%), internal employees unknowingly clicking on malware links (46%) and malicious insiders taking data to sell on the dark web (34%).
“AI will help solve these problems by surfacing potential vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them and providing enterprise security teams with the insight they need to spot malicious activity,” Ho said.
IT leaders named lack of trust as the second-leading challenge to cybersecurity. Respondents said a lack of trust in their security teams (33%) and employee education (29%) were the two biggest issues.
“AI can help fill this gap by providing organization leaders the data they need to make informed decisions on what actions to take, when and how,” Ho said. “[AI] can also improve security expertise within organizations through automatic learning from data sets.”
The survey polled 500 IT leaders who responded from Feb. 13 to 20, 2018.
More information is available in the research paper: “Trend Micro: AI will replace all cybersecurity roles by 2030; 1st Survey of 500 IT leaders” and the summary whitepaper.