Book Image

Machine Learning for Cybersecurity Cookbook

By : Emmanuel Tsukerman
Book Image

Machine Learning for Cybersecurity Cookbook

By: Emmanuel Tsukerman

Overview of this book

Organizations today face a major threat in terms of cybersecurity, from malicious URLs to credential reuse, and having robust security systems can make all the difference. With this book, you'll learn how to use Python libraries such as TensorFlow and scikit-learn to implement the latest artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and handle challenges faced by cybersecurity researchers. You'll begin by exploring various machine learning (ML) techniques and tips for setting up a secure lab environment. Next, you'll implement key ML algorithms such as clustering, gradient boosting, random forest, and XGBoost. The book will guide you through constructing classifiers and features for malware, which you'll train and test on real samples. As you progress, you'll build self-learning, reliant systems to handle cybersecurity tasks such as identifying malicious URLs, spam email detection, intrusion detection, network protection, and tracking user and process behavior. Later, you'll apply generative adversarial networks (GANs) and autoencoders to advanced security tasks. Finally, you'll delve into secure and private AI to protect the privacy rights of consumers using your ML models. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to tackle real-world problems faced in the cybersecurity domain using a recipe-based approach.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

CAPTCHA breaker

A CAPTCHA is a system intended to prevent automated access or scraping. It does so by asking questions that are meant to recognize when the user is a human and when the user is a program. You have probably seen countless variations of the following screenshot:

Sometimes, the request is to insert a code, sometimes it is to select some objects, for example, storefronts or traffic lights in a series of images, and sometimes the CAPTCHA is a math question. In this chapter, we are going to break a simple CAPTCHA system, called Really Simple CAPTCHA:

Despite its simplicity, Really Simple CAPTCHA is still widely used. Most importantly, it will illustrate how to approach breaking other, more complicated, CAPTCHA systems.
The first step will be to process the CAPTCHA dataset so that it is convenient for machine learning. The most naive approach to the problem is likely...