Hostile threat actions have become so common these days that they focus on extracting sensitive information by targeting certain organizations. These malware practices have gained a surge in recent years, thereby making our software systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To cope with these alarming hazards, researchers at Cardiff University have introduced a new approach to identify and then terminate these cyberattacks in less than a second. Yes, “less than a second”! This incredibly amazing discovery has now secured our laptops, computers, and other devices from such threats, which could corrupt our systems and expose our crucial information to hackers. This technique uses artificial intelligence to run the program in our system and is capable of detecting and eliminating up to 92% of threats in 0.3 seconds.
This new method has been launched in collaboration with Airbus by deploying machine learning along with artificial intelligence to lay out a comprehensive process through which this malware can be detected in a matter of seconds. However, previous practices of preventing our systems from cyber-attacks, i.e., “Endpoint detection and response (EDR)”, focused on the same thing, but the problem arises when the detected malware is being sent to administrators for removal. In the meantime, the hackers have already become successful in their mission of corrupting our system. This was the major bottleneck that has now culminated in the new approach in which as soon as the virus is detected, it is immediately eliminated from the system.
The lead author of the study, Matilda Rhode, now Head of Innovation and Scouting at Airbus, said: “While we still have some way to go in terms of improving the accuracy of this system before it could be implemented, this is an important step towards an automated real-time detection system that would not only benefit our laptops and computers but also our smart speakers, thermostats, cars, and refrigerators as the ‘Internet of Things” becomes more prevalent.”
Furthermore, as the co-author of the study, Professor Pete Burnap, describes, “Once a threat is detected, due to the fast-acting nature of some destructive malware, it is vital to have automated actions to support these detections.” We were motivated to undertake this work as there was nothing available that could do this kind of automated detecting and killing on a user’s machine in real-time.”
Hence, before launching it officially, the team is testing this amazing approach in a simulated environment consisting of normally used computers and laptops through an AI-based technique by artificially infecting them with thousands of malware samples.