AI in Cybersecurity (Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 151)

This book presents a collection of state-of-the-art AI approaches to cybersecurity and cyberthreat intelligence, offering strategic defense mechanisms for malware, addressing cybercrime, and assessing vulnerabilities to yield proactive rather than reactive countermeasures. The current variety and scope of cybersecurity threats far exceed the capabilities of even the most skilled security professionals. In addition, analyzing yesterday’s security incidents no longer enables experts to predict and prevent tomorrow’s attacks, which necessitates approaches that go far beyond identifying known threats.

Nevertheless, there are promising avenues: complex behavior matching can isolate threats based on the actions taken, while machine learning can help detect anomalies, prevent malware infections, discover signs of illicit activities, and protect assets from hackers. In turn, knowledge representation enables automated reasoning over network data, helping achieve cybersituational awareness. Bringing together contributions by high-caliber experts, this book suggests new research directions in this critical and rapidly growing field.

Leslie F. Sikos, Ph.D. is a computer scientist specializing in formal knowledge representation, ontology engineering, and automated reasoning applied to various domains, including cyberthreat intelligence and network applications that require cybersituational awareness. He has worked in both academia and the industry, and acquired hands-on skills with datacenter and cloud infrastructures, cyberthreat management, and firewall configuration. He holds professional certificates and is a member of various industry-leading organizations, such as the ACM, the Association for Automated Reasoning, the IEEE Special Interest Group on Big Data for Cyber Security and Privacy, and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.