14 Top Cybersecurity Trends To Expect At Black Hat Conference

Use Of AI In Ransomware Reconnaissance

Cyberdefenders are increasingly using artificial intelligence to conduct reconnaissance and get visibility into how adversaries are weaponizing ransomware, according to John Maddison, Fortinet’s chief marketing officer and executive vice president of products. A single malicious DNS call can be the start of a ransomware attack, so Maddison said it’s critical that companies leverage AI to connect the dots.

Artificial intelligence can look across billions of pieces of data to connect honeypot or receptor activity in a particular geography or industry to a vulnerability the company is already familiar with, Maddison said. Artificial intelligence has made significant progress at a functional level, which he said has allowed organizations to make inferences or tie up loose ends within the endpoint, network or application itself.

But complex threats typically sit across the network, the endpoint and the application layers, meaning that artificial intelligence needs to be brought across multiple technologies to bear fruit for businesses, Maddison said. Artificial intelligence has the potential to look across people, processes and data and deliver insight at a scale that simply wouldn’t be possible manually.