Cybercrime is going to be costing the world (or at least the high-tech sector) 10.5 trillion a year by 2025, and financial institutions are forced to implement AI cybersecurity measures as the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK notes that AI is almost guaranteed to raise the number of cyber attacks and the scale of cyber attacker attacks (including ransomware) in the next two years, with such large banks as Bank of America already showing how AI-driven fraud detection algorithms can screen millions of account balances.
The costs of cybercrime are at record levels
Cybercrime is increasing at a very high rate. By 2025, the cost of cybercrime will be $10.5 trillion, $7 trillion higher than it was in 2015, as per Virtasant. This number has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, showing how badly cybersecurity is at such a low level around the world today. Every year, groups of cyber criminals discover new technologies to exploit, new methods to use, and new loopholes to breach enterprise systems.
Every breach may contain millions of records, and certain industries may cost up to $429 per record, which is hundreds of millions of dollars of lost value. On top of the financial consequences of a cyber attack, organizations suffer reputational damage, with three-quarters of users stating that they wanted to begin a relationship with a brand after a high-profile security breach.
The threat landscape of AI changes fast
According to the UK government, artificial intelligence is likely to make the global ransomware threat riskier within the next two years, as cyber chiefs have warned in a new report released by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The evaluation concludes that AI is already being employed in illicit cyber activity and will certainly grow the amount and intensity of cyber attacks.
Banks deploy fraud detection systems powered by AI
To fight increased banking fraud, Bank of America introduced an artificial intelligence-based fraud detection, response, and management system. In three years, the BoA served more than 19.5 million customer accounts with its AI cybersecurity bot Erica. Erica researches more than 400,000 suspicious interactions every day, examining them to collect additional information about each request.
Rather than a cybersecurity agent needing to track every one of these requests, Erica can do it automatically and 24 hours a day. This AI cybersecurity application decreases the workload of cybersecurity professionals dramatically. With the latest attack vector patterns, Erica is able to identify fraud in an account and freeze the account.
Enterprise-scale AI monitoring capabilities
IBM Security has operations in 130 countries and has more than 10,000 security customers across the globe. IBM also introduced Threat Detection and Response Service (TDR), an AI-based threat monitoring, investigation, and remediation service that operates in the hybrid cloud environment of all clients. Using AI in cybersecurity, IBM can issue more frequent notifications about threat detection by automatically monitoring client systems.
AI cybersecurity is contributing to addressing three of the largest issues companies are now struggling with, including detecting fraud, zero-day threats, and mobilization of threat response. AI cybersecurity enables businesses to identify disruption in their core systems more precisely, spotting zero-day threats before they turn into an issue, whilst automating monitoring and response on all attack surfaces. The AI technologies that IBM has created are capable of automating up to 85 percent of cybersecurity operations in the global arena, which is simply inconceivable to save time among security officers.
With cybercrime expenses approaching $10.5 trillion each year, financial institutions and businesses are increasingly implementing AI-based cybersecurity solutions that have the potential to monitor millions of endpoints, automate threat detection, and respond to attacks at an unprecedented scale and speed, proving that artificial intelligence is becoming a necessity and no longer an option in combating sophisticated cyber threats.