February 9 is recognised as ‘Safer Internet Day’ across the globe. This year, as the theme ‘Together for a better internet’ guides the campaign, we want to highlight how AI can be a great tool for cybersecurity as AI capabilities are used to enhance online safety.

• Detect fake news: One of the biggest menaces of online media and social media networks is the rapid spread of fake news, a phenomenon that has been witnessed aplenty during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Given how easy it is for any news, verified or not, to go viral, it becomes imperative for authorities and social media companies to find ways to filter the good from the bad. AI algorithms are being deployed by almost every major social media giant to bust the rumour-mongering, an occurrence so commonplace that it has earned its own nomenclature – infodemic. 
• Detect phishing attacks: One of the most commonly used cyber attacks, phishing impersonates a trustworthy source, such as a website, and lures the user into sharing sensitive information. AI is particularly efficient in detecting common phishing sources and reporting them to the system to prepare for defenses. AI can also easily recognize the difference between a fake and a legitimate website. 
• Biometric authentications: Passwords that are keyed in online can be susceptible to theft by hackers and people with nefarious intent. AI has enabled users to use facial recognition or iris scans in place of manual password entries, creating an additional safeguard for online protection. 
• Detect DGA-Generated Domains: Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) create pseudorandom domain names (like gjdsiygigwigbbg.com). Since DGA is capable of producing tens of thousands of these, it is a waste of time to trying to block them. Deep learning is very effective at recognising malicious domains created by a DGA. The randomness of the domain names and meaningless groups of letters makes them fairly easy to use as training models for a neural network. After seeing enough of these pseudo-random domains, neural networks have been pretty successful at spotting them.