Will work with eight leading universities and their students to help train Watson on the language of cyber security
IBM Security has announced Watson for Cyber Security, a new cloud-based version of the company’s cognitive technology trained on the language of security. To further scale the system, IBM plans to collaborate with eight universities to greatly expand the collection of security data IBM has trained the cognitive system with.
Training Watson for Cyber Security is a critical step in the advancement of cognitive security. Watson is learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed. Starting this fall, IBM will work with leading universities and their students to further train Watson on the language of cyber security, including: California State Polytechnic University; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo.
According to the press release, IBM efforts are designed to improve security analysts’ capabilities using cognitive systems that automate the connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies. IBM intends to begin beta production deployments that take advantage of IBM Watson for Cyber Security later this year. IBM’s X-Force research library will be a central part of the materials fed to Watson for Cyber Security. This body of knowledge includes 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and over 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.
Designed on the IBM Cloud, Watson for Cyber Security will be the first technology to offer cognition of security data at scale using Watson’s ability to reason and learn from “unstructured data” – 80 percent of all data on the internet that traditional security tools cannot process, including blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts, and other information, said the release.
IBM analysis found that the average organization leverages only 8 percent of this unstructured data. Watson for Cyber Security also uses natural language processing to understand the vague and imprecise nature of human language in unstructured data. As a result, Watson for Cyber Security is designed to provide insights into emerging threats, as well as recommendations on how to stop them, increasing the speed and capabilities of security professionals.
Marc van Zadelhoff, GM, IBM Security said, “Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security. The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime. By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations, and knowledge to security professionals, bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cyber security analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training.”
Anupam Joshi, Director of UMBC’s Center for Cyber security and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, at UMBC, who will lead the ACCL at UMBC commented, “This collaboration will allow our students and faculty to work with IBM to advance the state-of-the-art in cognitive computing and cyber security.”
