Watson, IBM's supercomputer, has a new mission: to help companies fight cybercrime with the weapons of cognitive computing power
IBM has announced that Watson Cyber Security is now ready to take the field to identify and combat potentially dangerous hacker threats. Watson's artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a year of training in order to help analysts better understand the information they need to do their jobs every day.
Watson for Cyber Security, at this point, will be integrated into IBM's new SOC Cognitive platform. This solution will combine the cognitive understanding component with the ability to read and respond to threats across the board, from PCs to networks, from users to software that operates in the cloud. The key element, IBM explains, is the IBM Qradar Advisor with Watson, which draws from Watson's database of security information and correlates it with threats reported by the platform. The first to use Watson for Cyber Security will be Avnet, Sopra Steria and the University of New Brunswick.
Vocal Commands
IBM also plans to equip Watson with a voice assistant - named Havyn - that can respond to commands and requests from security analysts in natural language. The Havyn project connects to Watson's application programming interfaces (APIs), or programming tools, and uses BlueMix and IBM Cloud to provide real-time response to requests and commands, access to data from open-source security intelligence systems - including IBM X-Force Exchange - as well as specific historical data from a customer and its security tools.
Cognitive Intelligence
Cognitive computing and artificial intelligence tools can provide a high level of interpretation, and comparing threats to information in the database - including blogs, specialized security websites, research and other industry sources - is a relatively new approach to security. Not surprisingly, IBM notes, only 7 percent of cybersecurity professionals currently use cognitive tools, but that number will triple in just two to three years.