The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Cyberspace

Angela W Muriuki

Department of Science, Apollo University

303, Public Review

Silvester Makau

21/5/2021

Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural
intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality.
The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym
chosen. 'Strong' AI is usually labelled as artificial general intelligence (AGI) while attempts to
emulate 'natural' intelligence have been called artificial biological intelligence (ABI). Leading AI
textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its
environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.
Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines that mimic
"cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and
"problem solving".(Dobrev 2012.)

History of Artificial Intelligence

The study of mechanical or "formal" reasoning began with philosophers and mathematicians in
antiquity. The study of mathematical logic led directly to Alan Turing's theory of computation,
which suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as simple as "0" and "1", could simulate
any conceivable act of mathematical deduction. This insight, that digital computers can simulate
any process of formal reasoning, is known as the Church–Turing thesis (Copeland 1997.) The
field of AI research was born at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956, where the term
"Artificial Intelligence" was coined by John McCarthy to distinguish the field from cybernetics
and escape the influence of the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener. Attendees Allen Newell (CMU),
Herbert Simon (CMU), John McCarthy (MIT), Marvin Minsky (MIT) and Arthur Samuel (IBM)
became the founders and leaders of AI research. They and their students produced programs that
the press described as "astonishing".Computers were learning checkers strategies, solving word
problems in algebra and speaking English(McCorduck et al.1977).

CyberSpace
Cyberspace is a global domain within the information environment consisting of the
interdependent network of information systems infrastructures including the Internet,
telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.
(Ottis & Lorents 2010,.)Cyberspace allows users to share information, interact, swap ideas, play
games, engage in discussions or social forums, conduct business and create intuitive media,
among many other activities.

History of cyberspace
The term "cyberspace" first appeared in the visual arts in the late 1960s, when Danish artist
Susanne Ussing and her partner architect Carsten Hoff constituted themselves as Atelier
Cyberspace. Under this name the two made a series of installations and images entitled "sensory
spaces" that were based on the principle of open systems adaptable to various influences, such as
human movement and the behaviour of new materials. (Jutte & Jütte 2005,.) Don Slater uses a
metaphor to define cyberspace, describing the "sense of a social setting that exists purely within
a space of representation and communication ... it exists entirely within a computer space,
distributed across increasingly complex and fluid networks." The term "Cyberspace" started to
become a de facto synonym for the Internet, and later the World Wide Web, during the 1990s,
especially in academic circles and activist communities. Author Bruce Sterling, who popularized
this meaning,credits John Perry Barlow as the first to use it to refer to "the present-day nexus of
computer and telecommunications networks".(Slater 2000.)

Impact of AI on cybersecurity
1. Threat hunting
Traditional security techniques use signatures or indicators of compromise to identify threats.
This technique might work well for previously encountered threats, but they are not effective for
threats that have not been discovered yet.
Signature-based techniques can detect about 90% of threats. Replacing traditional techniques
with AI can increase the detection rates up to 95%, but you will get an explosion of false
positives. The best solution would be to combine both traditional methods and AI. This can
result in a 100% detection rate and minimize false positives.(Neto & dos Santos 2020.)
2. Vulnerability management
20,362 new vulnerabilities were reported in 2019, up 17.8% compared to 2018. Organizations
are struggling to prioritize and manage the large amount of new vulnerabilities they encounter on
a daily basis. Traditional vulnerability management methods tend to wait for hackers to exploit
high-risk vulnerabilities before neutralizing them.
While traditional vulnerability databases are critical to manage and contain known
vulnerabilities, AI and machine learning techniques like User and Event Behavioral Analytics
can analyze baseline behavior of user accounts, endpoint and servers, and identify anomalous
behavior that might signal a zero-day unknown attack. This can help protect organizations even
before vulnerabilities are officially reported and patched.(Benzaid & Taleb 2020.)

3. Data centers
AI can optimize and monitor many essential data center processes like backup power, cooling
filters, power consumption, internal temperatures, and bandwidth usage. The calculative powers
and continuous monitoring capabilities of AI provide insights into what values would improve
the effectiveness and security of hardware and infrastructure.
In addition, AI can reduce the cost of hardware maintenance by alerting you when you have to
fix the equipment. These alerts enable you to repair your equipment before it breaks in a more
severe manner. In fact, Google reported a 40 percent reduction in cooling costs at their facility
and a 15 percent reduction in power consumption after implementing AI technology within data
centers in 2016(Kaloudi & Li 2020.)

4. Network security
Traditional network security has two time-intensive aspects, creating security policies and
understanding the network topography of an organization.

● Policies—security policies identify which network connections are legitimate and which
you should further inspect for malicious behavior. You can use these policies to
effectively enforce a zero-trust model. The real challenge lies in creating and maintaining
the policies given the large amount of networks. (Khan &Qin 2017.)
● Topography—most organizations don’t have the exact naming conventions for
applications and workloads. As a result, security teams have to spend a lot of time
determining what set of workloads belong to a given application. (Madhok & Grover
2016)

Drawbacks and Limitations of Using AI for Cybersecurity

There are also some limitations that prevent AI from becoming a mainstream security tool:

● Resources—companies need to invest a lot of time and money in resources like

computing power, memory, and data to build and maintain AI systems.
● Data sets—AI models are trained with learning data sets. Security teams need to get their
hands on many different data sets of malicious codes, malware codes, and anomalies.
Some companies just don’t have the resources and time to obtain all of these accurate
data sets.
● Hackers also use AI—attackers test and improve their malware to make it resistant to
AI-based security tools. Hackers learn from existing AI tools to develop more advanced
attacks and attack traditional security systems or even AI-boosted systems.(Lin 2019.)
● Neural fuzzing—fuzzing is the process of testing large amounts of random input data
within software to identify its vulnerabilities. Neural fuzzing leverages AI to quickly test
large amounts of random inputs. However, fuzzing has also a constructive side. Hackers
can learn about the weaknesses of a target system by gathering information with the
power of neural networks. Microsoft developed a method to apply this approach to
improve their software, resulting in more secure code that is harder to exploit.
(Khisamova & Sidorenko 2019.)
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