In a recent study on combating cybersecurity attacks, two-thirds of 3,866 information technology (IT) professionals surveyed across the Americas, Europe and Asia said artificial intelligence (AI) tools could reduce false alerts and increase team effectiveness. Yet, only 25 percent of the respondents reported currently using some form of an AI-based security system.

“Despite massive investments in cybersecurity programs, our research found most businesses are still unable to stop advanced, targeted attacks,” wrote Larry Ponemon, chairman of the research group Ponemon Institute LLC. He added that 45 percent of those surveyed “believed that they are not realizing the full value of their defense arsenal.”

AI has become a critically important component of cybersecurity, according to Mansur Hasib, who is the cybersecurity technology program chair of the University of Maryland University College graduate school, because the amount of data is magnifying almost at levels that are not possible to humanly decipher.

“In a typical IT environment, you might get billions of inquiries, records, events happening in a span of hours. The number of events and alerts can magnify so much that artificial intelligence is needed to help look at logs from a variety of sources,” said Hasib.

Companies are not investing enough in the systems that are already out there, said Hasib. “That is part of the problem. With the amount of data that exists now, any company not using some form of AI to help them look at events, needs to.”