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Cyber Patrol must notify the supervisory authority within 72 hours. Such notification should include detailed information about who was affected, the overall impact of the breach and actions taken to remediate the breach, warn Ponemon researchers. “Vectra reports show that we re- duce security analyst workloads by 29X,” said Banic. That reduction in workload brings up another big benefit of AI and automation: the widely re- ported IT skills shortage. The lack of workers with adequate skills is among the top reasons why security breaches occur, show Ponemon surveys, and AI, for better or worse, is the ultimate human labor re- placement. After all, 43 percent of Ponemon respondents listed human error as a top three reason why security events continue to happen despite investment in protections. “Computers are clearly better at some tasks than humans,” said Len- ny Zeltser, vice president of prod- ucts at Minerva Labs, which offers endpoint security solutions. Some of those tasks include being able to capture and process large volumes of data, sift through it to find hidden patterns or use artificial intelligence to distinguish between legitimate and malicious activities, said Zeltser. “Given the scarcity of informa- tion security specialists, automation plays a key role in the ability of en- terprises to defend themselves from cyber-adversaries,” he said. “AI helps organizations substitute computing power for labor sources, and automation helps process more data with fewer resources, both addressing the cybersecurity tal- ent struggle,” said Tony Rock, vice president at Lockpath, a provider of corporate governance, risk manage- ment, regulatory compliance and information security software. Indeed, AI may even actually increase the number of qualified cybersecurity professionals, said Banic, as it lowers the barriers of entry into the profession and allows less trained individuals to still be effective on the front lines of the cybersecurity battle. “In addition, AI will allow existing cybersecurity professionals to move up-market by leveraging AI to find more complex attack scenarios before they do sig- nificant damage,” he continued. Some of the other ways smart machines are being applied to se- curity efforts include intelligently automating the creation and de- ployment of sophisticated decep- tion campaigns in order to detect attackers inside the network, said Rick Moy, chief marketing officer at Acalvio, a provider of autono- mous deception solutions. “AI can also be employed to mine SIEM and infrastructure data to track back to root causes of breaches, and even project likely targets of attack,” he added September - October, 2018 | Channel Vision 27