Innovating for Security and Resilience
As the cybersecurity industry faces a paradigm shift, AI offers the potential to boost resilience and amplify the skill, speed, and knowledge of defenders.
“While human ingenuity and expertise will always be a precious and irreplaceable component of cyber defense, technology has the potential to augment these unique capabilities with the skill sets, processing speeds, and rapid learning of modern AI.”
- Bret Arsenault, Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer
Responding with breakthrough innovation
Against an ever more complex cyber ecosystem, artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential to change the security landscape by augmenting the skill, speed, and knowledge of defenders.
AI can also enable new capabilities, such as using large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language insights and recommendations from complex data and giving analysts new opportunities to learn.
In the 2023 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, we explore some of the AI breakthroughs that are transforming cybersecurity, risks associated with AI and LLMs, and how we can ensure they are used to create a more secure and resilient digital future.
How can we harness LLMs for cyber defense?
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Threat intelligence and analysis
LLMs can help cyber defenders gather and analyze data to find patterns and trends in cyber threats. They can also add context to threat intelligence by using information from different sources and perform technical tasks like reverse engineering and malware analysis.
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Security incident response and recovery
LLMs can help cyber defenders support and automate security incident response and recovery, including incident triage, containment, eradication, analysis, and recovery. They can summarize incidents and generate response automation scripts, coordinate teams, and document and communicate the incident details and actions. LLMs can also help us learn from incidents and provide improvement suggestions for prevention and mitigation.
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Security monitoring and detection
LLMs can monitor and detect security events and incidents across networks, systems, applications, and data. They can analyze data, generate prioritized alerts, and provide contextual information for investigation and response. LLMs can also analyze the posture of multicloud environments, creating comprehensive maps of resources, estimate potential impacts, and offer risk mitigation suggestions. They can be useful for phish detection by analyzing email content and identifying textual patterns, anomalies, and suspicious language indicative of phishing attempts.
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Security testing and validation
LLMs can automate and enhance security testing and validation, including penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, code analysis, and configuration auditing. They generate and execute test cases, evaluate and report results, and offer remediation suggestions. LLMs can create custom apps and tools for specific scenarios, automate repetitive tasks, and handle occasional or ad hoc tasks that require manual intervention.
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Security awareness and education
LLMs can help cyber defenders create engaging and personalized content and scenarios for security awareness and education. They can assess the level of security knowledge and skills of a target audience, provide feedback and guidance, and generate realistic and adaptive cyber exercises and simulations for training and testing.
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Security governance, risk, and compliance
LLMs can assist in automating security governance, risk, and compliance activities including policy development and enforcement, risk assessment/management, audit and assurance, and compliance and reporting. They can align activities with business goals and provide security metrics and dashboards for performance measurement. They can also identify gaps and issues and offer recommendations to improve the organization's security posture, prioritize vulnerabilities, and identify remediation suggestions.
Lowering the entry bar for using modern AI innovations
While LLM-based solutions show great potential for cybersecurity, they are not a replacement for human cybersecurity experts. Having the right expertise is key when it comes to combining LLMs and cybersecurity. One solution is to bring together the skills of AI professionals and cybersecurity experts to enhance productivity.
Fortunately, the use of LLMs in cybersecurity operations is not limited to large organizations with abundant resources. These models have been trained on vast amounts of data, giving them a pre-existing understanding of cybersecurity.
LLMs excel at synthesizing complex information and presenting it in clear, concise language – helping analysts select the best cyber analytics for different scenarios. As the threat landscape evolves and analysis techniques expand, even experienced analysts can struggle to keep up, and LLMs can act as personal assistants, suggesting analysis and mitigation options.
Working together to shape responsible AI
Responsible AI by design
With AI technology promising to transform society, we must secure a future of responsible AI by design. Responsible AI practices are crucial for maintaining user trust, protecting privacy, and creating long-term benefits for society.
Upholding our own ethical standards in AI
We must lead by example and invest in research and development to stay ahead of emerging security threats. Microsoft is committed to ensuring that all its AI products and services are developed and used in a way that upholds our AI principles.
10 years of active AI policies
Microsoft is committed to ensuring that all our AI products and services are developed and used in a manner that upholds our AI principles. Simultaneously, we are working with industry partners to develop standards and technologies that enable transparent and verifiable information about the origin and authenticity of digital content to enhance trust online.
Across the globe, the appetite for regulatory guidance on the responsible development and use of AI is growing, with many countries drafting documentation offering guidance for managing emerging risks associated with AI technologies. This trend has been developing for over a decade, and it's only gaining momentum.
Explore other Microsoft Digital Defense Report chapters
Introduction
The power of partnerships is key to overcoming adversity by strengthening defenses and holding cybercriminals accountable.
The State of Cybercrime
While cybercriminals remain hard at work, the public and private sectors are coming together to disrupt their technologies and support the victims of cybercrime.
Nation State Threats
Nation state cyber operations are bringing governments and tech industry players together to build resilience against threats to online security.
Critical Cybersecurity Challenges
As we navigate the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape, holistic defense is a must for resilient organizations, supply chains, and infrastructure.
Innovating for Security and Resilience
As modern AI takes a massive leap forward, it will play a vital role in defending and ensuring the resilience of businesses and society.
Collective Defense
As cyberthreats evolve, collaboration is strengthening knowledge and mitigation across the global security ecosystem.
More on security
Our commitment to earn trust
Microsoft is committed to the responsible use of AI, protecting privacy, and advancing digital safety and cybersecurity.
Cyber Signals
A quarterly cyberthreat intelligence brief informed by the latest Microsoft threat data and research. Cyber Signals gives trends analysis and guidance to help strengthen the first line of defense.
Nation State Reports
Semi-annual reports on specific nation state actors that serve to warn our customers and the global community of threats posed by influence operations and cyber activity, identifying specific sectors and regions at heightened risk.
Microsoft Digital Defense Reports archive
Explore previous Microsoft Digital Defense Reports and see how the threat landscape and online safety has changed in a few short years.
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