CYBERSECURITY: What the human immune system can teach us about protecting our data.

Human operators are easily fooled by malware’s use of machine- learning techniques to blend into a network. This is where machine learning—techniques that train computers to adapt and learn from data with little or no human involvement—becomes a crucial part of the defense arsenal. Advanced—and, more important, constantly evolving—algorithms behave like an immune system for the enterprise. When the network is breached by a suspicious activity, whether from an insider or from an external threat, the system alerts the security team to that anomaly.

Recent advances in mathematics have improved this immune-system approach by adding digital antibodies that have the ability to act when they detect a serious threat. That action might involve isolating the infected machine or slowing down network activity until a human is available to assess the breach. This allows a company to neutralize fast-moving attacks like ransomware.

That’s from Nicole Eagan, CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace.