Page 73 - Cyber Defense eMagazine - November 2017

A NEW APPROACH TO HARNESSING MACHINE

LEARNING FOR SECURITY

by Sarosh Petkar, Malware Analyst, Barkly

For years, we’ve heard the same things over and over again about the challenge of
cybersecurity. Attackers will always be one step ahead of organizations. The amount of
malware they’re producing is overwhelming and increasing every day. Compromise is
inevitable.

But with the adoption of machine learning, security technologies are providing organizations
with new ways to tackle this seemingly intractable problem. Models can process extremely large
datasets and be trained to identify similarities in malware samples that make them distinct from
good software. Retraining the models can also be automated to keep pace with the massive
influx of new and changing samples that overwhelm traditional solutions.

There are however, a couple of caveats that present challenges to machine learning, and limit
the level of accuracy these models can achieve.

73 Cyber Defense eMagazine – November 2017 Edition
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