AI is revolutionizing cybersecurity, making it quicker, smarter, and far more able to adapt to novel challenges. It rapidly analyzes massive volumes of data to identify uncommon patterns or behavior that could help in the early detection of potential threats, preventing damage. Morgan Stanley reports that cybersecurity professionals spent $15 billion on AI in 2021 and that figure has obviously increased a lot since.
AI is also capable of learning to get better, which helps it stay one step ahead of cybercriminals by updating its approach to fighting them. Another benefit of AI is that it helps cybersecurity professionals save time on mundane tasks so that they can focus more of their efforts on more important tasks that AI is not able to deal with on its own. This includes automating reviewing logs of users trying to access the system. This is how AI makes organizations more secure and equips people with better means of protecting what is important to them.
Complex IT ecosystems can be challenging to manage because they have so many moving parts. Like an e-commerce business or a multinational company with various business units, you’ve got vendors, contractors, in-house employees, and more. They work across multiple platforms and vast regions. Yet, all of these platforms, every site, and every device demand security for the sake of your organization’s integrity. AI is crucial for assisting with this.
After all, the security concerns of a complex IT ecosystem are much greater than those of a single, unified corporation or small business that has in-house employees. An example would be a company that stores data but doesn’t perform most of its functions on the Internet. In contrast, organizations that operate mostly online, outsource many of their tasks, and have multiple locations, need to be extra vigilant about preventing unauthorized access to criminals.
Here are some ways that AI can help you prevent unauthorized access to your IT systems.
Implement Robust Access Controls
With so many users to keep track of and secure, it’s imperative that your organization implements robust access controls across the board. Without them, you could have a bad actor exploiting vulnerabilities and using your data against you. You also run the risk of a new employee making a mistake, a tired employee leaving their passwords exposed, or a contract employee not taking your security policy seriously.
For these reasons and more, you can take several steps to limit and control user access to everyone working with your company. The first step is to implement application allowlisting for your in-house employees. This process ensures that only trusted applications and software are allowed to run on company devices. Anything else that tries to download or run will be immediately shut down. Your company computers, phones, and tablets will be unable to run malware, for example.
Next, set up endpoint privilege management across your entire company, for employees, vendors, and contractors. This system works to allow access only to necessary data to the employees who need it. You can also run background checks on anyone you plan to give any kind of system access to. This will help you weed out anyone with a criminal background or even anyone prone to careless mistakes, which can cost millions if they lead to a data breach.
Monitor All User Activity
Once you’ve tightened up your security in terms of who is allowed to access your networks and what is allowed to run on your devices, it’s time to establish continuous monitoring. This is where AI can become incredibly helpful. In the digital world, it is quite literally impossible to have a human security team monitoring all of your user activity around the clock. Never mind the security you need to monitor any attempts at unauthorized access. And yes, you need both.
That’s where AI comes in. Machine learning allows AI to continuously monitor the activity of all of your users, across your company, including those coming from the outside, like vendors or contractors. At first, you might think this step is not related to unauthorized access, but it is. How? Say you hire a trusted contractor and allow them limited access, only what they need, and then you stop worrying about it. You did your due diligence.
However, the trusted contractor is working for a bad actor, who only needs that limited access to begin breaking down your firewalls from inside the system. Continuous monitoring can prevent this from happening thanks to predictive analytics. All users will be monitored, suspicious activity will be identified, and attempts at hacking or exposing zero-day vulnerabilities will be squashed. Let all of your staff know that this is your company protocol, and you’ll likely prevent anyone inside from even attempting to breach your data.
Divide and Encrypt
Finally, to truly prevent unauthorized access to your network, you need to think about your security as layered. No matter how much security you build into your network, how intelligent your AI is, or how well-trusted your employees are, you may still have someone get past that first layer. All it takes is for a hacker to get lucky with a zero-day vulnerability or for a disgruntled or greedy employee to abandon security protocols. What then?
This is when you want to start thinking about the next layer of security. First, you can implement network segmentation. This process will break your network into smaller, isolated units, which will stop hackers from accessing your entire network from a single point of entry. Network segmentation reinforces privileged endpoint management and prevents any attack that does get into the network from spreading. As a bonus, it will improve operation performance by removing extra traffic.
Then, encrypt your data both while it is at rest and while it is in transit. Data encryption will scramble all of the information in your network into unreadable code that can only be unlocked by an authorized user with the highest clearance. This user should have multi-factor authentications and strong passwords. That way, even if a hacker does manage to access your stored data, they haven’t really, because they can’t read it.
In the end, complex IT ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to attack, so it is critical you take every precaution to prevent unauthorized access. You can do this by ensuring you have only the most trusted people with access to the highly sensitive data in your network. Everyone else will have only the access they need. Then, divide your network, encrypt your data, and continuously monitor all user activity. Now, you, your employees, and your clients can trust in the virtually impenetrable force field around your data.