AI Is Valuable, But 'Human Intuition' Remains A Trusted Confidant of Cybersecurity Teams

• WhiteHat Security surveyed 102 industry professionals at the RSA Conference 2020.

• The survey found 20% security professionals believe AI has made their cybersecurity teams more efficient.

• 65% respondents said that AI tools let them focus more on mitigating and preventing cyberattacks than they could previously.

Artificial Intelligence is a sophisticated and valuable weapon for security professionals against cybercriminals that can operate faster and efficiently than human beings. Howbeit, AI isn't perfect.

According to a survey from WhiteHat Security, many security pros still want the human element to play a significant role in their security defenses.

The survey called, "AI and Human Element Security Sentiment Study" at the RSA Conference 2020. The survey conducted on 102 industry professionals found that more than half of the respondents are using AI or machine learning in their security efforts. It also found that more than 20% of security professionals believe AI-based tools have made their cybersecurity teams more efficient by eliminating a huge number of mundane tasks.

REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

1. Half of the organizations use AI or Machine Learning in their security stacks.
2. 60% trust findings verified by humans over AI.
3. 75% use an application security tool.
4. 40% of those appsec solutions use both AI and human verification.
 

Furthermore, respondents over 40% feel their stress levels have dropped since adding AI tools to their security process. While 65% said that AI tools let them focus more on mitigating and preventing cyberattacks than they could previously.

Regardless, incorporating AI doesn't take human beings out of the security equation, in fact, a majority of the respondents agreed that the human element offers skills that AI and ML can't match. 

Almost 60% of the respondents said they remain more confident in cyberthreat findings that are verified by humans over AI. When asked why they prefer the human touch, 30% pointed to intuition as the most important human element, 21% mentioned the role of creativity, and almost 20% cited previous experience and frame of reference as the most critical advantage of humans over AI.

READ MORE: Imperva uses AI  to block AI-weaponised cyber threats

WhitePoint described three reasons it supplements its own AI and ML learning systems with human verification:

• To ensure that vulnerabilities that can't automatically be verified by the machine learning subsystem are verified by humans.

• To add new human-curated vulnerabilities to the 150+ terabyte pool of attack vector data for future machine learning endeavors.

• To perform quality control on a sample of the automatically verified vulnerabilities and provide feedback to fine-tune machine learning models as needed.

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