Pit the machines against the machines to keep your data safe. That's the philosophy of cybersecurity start-up Darktrace, which uses artificial intelligence to fight cybercrime against corporations. "It's clear that we're now in the midst of a cyberarms race, and the battlefield is going to be inside of every company network and we're going to see a war against algorithms," Darktrace co-founder and CEO Nicole Eagan tells CNBC Make It. "We're going to see attackers beef up their mathematical and artificial intelligence algorithms and we're going to see the defenders doing the same. And this is going to probably continue on for some period of time — we expect actually that's going to get worse before it gets better." The answer to combating such threats, in Eagan's estimation, is AI.

Using the human body as inspiration

"Darktrace's AI technology is software that can run in a cloud, in a corporate network, in a manufacturing plant floor or power facility," says Eagan. (Customers typically sign a multiyear subscription that includes the AI cyberdefense software as well as access to Darktrace's experts.) It fights threats from attackers gaining access to company computer networks via internet connected devices to upset company insiders using their position to take advantage of company networks. But its artificial intelligence takes inspiration from something distinctly organic: the way the human immune system fights illness. It makes sense, as even the common cybersecurity lexicon has talked of viruses.

Nicole Eagan, co-founder and CEO of Darktrace Photo courtesy Darktrace



As Eagan puts it, "Evolved over billions of years, the human body's immune system has the unique ability to understand 'self' — what is part of us and what is not us — allowing it to rapidly detect and contain emerging threats, even those our body has not encountered before. "Similarly, Darktrace works by learning a sense of 'self' across the entire digital business and identifying emerging threats in real time," she said. Its machine learning understands normal patterns of behavior of every user and every device connected to a corporate network. "By learning this evolving 'pattern of life' for every user and device," Darktrace is able to then identify deviations from normal activity, said Eagan, whose company has headquarters in San Francisco and Cambridge, England. "Like a digital antibody, it then instantly neutralizes the threat before it has time to cause damage." Tweet: Darktrace are taking inspiration from the intelligence of the human immune system to protect against cybersecurity threats Adds Eagan: "Human teams simply can't keep up without the help of artificial intelligence. Digital antibodies that can be shared around the world are a way to help combat new attacks."

Cybersecurity from the inside out

Real stories of cyberattack

"We actually find and stop threats every day," says Eagan. Darktrace, whose clients range from a 10-person hedge fund to a global bank and include the City of Las Vegas, Penguin Random House, Trek Bicycles, YMCA LA and National Hockey League Players' Association, sees one area of particular vulnerability in the internet of things, or devices that are connected to the internet. For example, one casino Darktrace was serving as a customer was hacked through its internet-enabled fish tank, says Eagan. The "very large" fish tank had an IoT-connected thermostat to measure the water temperature, says Eagan. "Well, they forgot to tell the I.T. and security departments about this new IoT device connected to the fish tank," says Eagan. "Low and behold, attackers scanned the network and were able to break in through this thermostat. Then they searched across and they tried to find the high-rollers database because that's what was of value to them, and they were able to find some of that try to pull it back across the network and steal the data and move it up to a cloud." Eagan says Darktrace was able to spot the activity because it wasn't usual behavior. "Normally, the thermostat wouldn't look for the high-roller database," she says. "So we were able to spot it and stop it right in its tracks."

A visualization of Darktrace's cyber artificial intelligence being deployed. Photo courtesy Darktrace

In another case of cybercrime caught by Darktrace, an employee of a large bank was surreptitiously using the company's computer servers and processing power to mine bitcoin. "His job was to load new servers into the computer room," Eagan tells CNBC Make It. "Once in a while he would just take one of these servers and hide it under the floorboards in the data center and eventually he put enough servers together that he started running his own bitcoin mining operation. ... This was doing something different than all the other servers in the data center, so Darktrace's artificial [intelligence] was able to spot it and stop it right away." In an amusement park working with Darktrace, an attacker was able to gain access to the corporate network through the company's smart locker system where guests can store personal affects. "Darktrace identified it before any data could be exfiltrated and their security team was able to remove the compromised locker from the network," Eagan says. Of course, the attacks coming from hackers will get ever more challenging to identify. "Ransomware is a great example of how threats evolve," says Eagan. "Right now we are seeing a lull in ransomware attacks which indicates to us that cybercriminals are currently developing new tactics to bypass these legacy tools. It's only a matter of time before we see the next WannaCry." In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware attack spread across 150 countries. "We do imagine there will be a time that the attackers themselves will start to employ AI techniques to blend into the background of noisy networks," says Eagan. "Ultimately, it will be an arms race between attackers and defenders – who will be able to deploy the better AI." But because AI is self-learning, using it helps Darktrace automatically evolve with the attacks, says Eagan.

The competition

A visualization of the Darktrace artificial intelligence in action. Photo courtesy Darktrace.

The future of the industry

Within cybersecurity, "The artificial intelligence market is ripe for massive growth over the next decade," Morgan tells CNBC Make It. In fact, the cybersecurity industry was faced with a global shortfall of 1 million job openings in 2014, and that will grow to 3.5 million unfilled positions by 2021, Morgan says. AI is the technology, more than any other, than can help organizations deal with that shortage, he says. "We expect rapid AI adoption over the next few years while cybersecurity unemployment will remain at zero percent." For her part, Eagan says the future of cyberdefense is having AI not only identifying but also responding to threats, an area into which Darktrace has started working already. Darktrace launched its autonomous response product over two years ago and currently has hundreds of customers using it. "The next step is really being able to use the AI to fight back to actually stop the attacks themselves," says Eagan. "That's an emerging area, we happen to call it 'autonomous response.' You've heard of autonomous vehicles — well, it's kind of along the same lines. "So that's really the next phase, and that's where people are going to have to really trust the technology to all of a sudden take action, without humans being in the middle or being involved," which can be tricky, says Eagan, but is necessary. "Autonomous response is the only way forward when it comes to fighting AI attacks," she says. — Video by Andrea Kramar See also: This start-up turns pollution from factories into fuel that powers cars — and one day planes

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