The year of 2018 wasn’t necessarily the best one for cybersecurity professionals. Not only did GDPR policies come into effect, but cybersecurity experts and IT officials were exposed to some extremely serious threats and attacks.

Microsoft’s Azure security team observed doubtful activity in the cloud computing utilization of many huge retailers. Microsoft rapidly notified their users and the attacks were countered almost immediately. They did this by continuously using artificial intelligence to monitor the networks.

Technology giants have started using Artificial Intelligence to fight against hackers. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and many up and coming start-ups are moving away from simply using “order based” technology planned to acknowledge an interruption and implementing machine learning algorithms to not just identify, but immediately start defending the networking systems.

“Machine learning is a very powerful technique for security—it’s dynamic, while rules-based systems are very rigid,” says Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. “It’s a very manual, intensive process to change them, whereas machine learning is automated, dynamic and you can retrain it easily.”

“We will see an improved ability to identify threats earlier in the attack cycle and thereby reduce the total amount of damage and more quickly restore systems to a desirable state,” says Amazon Chief Information Security Officer Stephen Schmidt. He acknowledges that it’s impossible to stop all intrusions but says his industry will “get incrementally better at protecting systems and make it incrementally harder for attackers.”

The combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning has already opened many avenues in many industries. Now, with the influx of data and the proportionate increase in the number of attempted cybersecurity attacks and data hacks, the two processes have now made it easier to identify and defend breaches.