The pandemic that we just witnessed taught us many lessons, including a reminder that humans have a tremendous potential to adapt and devise survival mechanisms in every situation. That's exactly what we did when we transitioned to this technologically powered working style. All these years, we believed we couldn't get the work or business moving without being present at the office premises. and how beautifully this belief was shattered, and we smoothly transitioned to bringing our office home. 

This scenario requires powerful technological advancements and, most importantly, a sturdy protective and security mechanism. The role of cybersecurity was always significant; however, with the huge development to boundary-less working now makes it impossible to ignore.

Indian organizations need to comply with international regulations and the proposed law on personal data protection, the Aadhaar Act. Moreover, cybercriminals are coming up with newer and more damaging ideas with the security solutions getting smarter. In line with this, we need to get over the conventional detection methods and utilize smarter methods. The traditional ways of threat detection, such as signature-based detection, need to be replaced by AI-powered mechanisms. 

One such massive cyber-attack named 'SolarWinds hack' recently took place in the USA, which attracted world attention. This is said to be one of the biggest cyberattacks to have targeted Microsoft, Google, and several US government agencies.

The whole world now believes that Artificial Intelligence's adaptive, sensitive, and sophisticated approach has huge potential in making a mark in cybersecurity. Organizations today have moved to cloud-based infrastructures, which are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks requiring more robust response capabilities strengthened by AI/ML.

AI has been proved excellent for cybersecurity owing to its capabilities such as identification and prioritization of risks. It can also instantly spot any malware on a network, guide incident response, and detect intrusions even before they start. 

Apart from the many benefits, the usage of AI in cybersecurity has few drawbacks too. However, we have no choice apart from working on these issues to make the AI-enabled security mechanisms more accurate.

Negative Impact of AI in Cybersecurity Space

• The high cost associated with building and maintaining the AI system acts as a restraining factor.
• As already mentioned, even cyber attackers are unethically using AI to make their systems more AI resistant.
• AI-based malware can be dangerous as they can evolve by learning the security solutions' detection patterns and can then penetrate even an AI-based system.
• The cost, time, and effort required to accumulate the data sets on which the AI algorithms can train is high. At the same time, we know that these data sets are critical to making AI systems more effective.
• AI-based systems must be highly accurate, and we must know that an underdeveloped AI system can be dangerous and might give us false false-positive results.

Change is the only constant, and hence we cannot sit back and relax believing that we have set our AI systems as guards. We all know that AI is as good as the data we feed it. AI and human partnership is an ongoing process and is also highly promising. This synergy is set to bring a positive change in the world if handled carefully.