Book Image

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity

By : Alessandro Parisi
Book Image

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity

By: Alessandro Parisi

Overview of this book

Today's organizations spend billions of dollars globally on cybersecurity. Artificial intelligence has emerged as a great solution for building smarter and safer security systems that allow you to predict and detect suspicious network activity, such as phishing or unauthorized intrusions. This cybersecurity book presents and demonstrates popular and successful AI approaches and models that you can adapt to detect potential attacks and protect your corporate systems. You'll learn about the role of machine learning and neural networks, as well as deep learning in cybersecurity, and you'll also learn how you can infuse AI capabilities into building smart defensive mechanisms. As you advance, you'll be able to apply these strategies across a variety of applications, including spam filters, network intrusion detection, botnet detection, and secure authentication. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to develop intelligent systems that can detect unusual and suspicious patterns and attacks, thereby developing strong network security defenses using AI.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: AI Core Concepts and Tools of the Trade
4
Section 2: Detecting Cybersecurity Threats with AI
8
Section 3: Protecting Sensitive Information and Assets
12
Section 4: Evaluating and Testing Your AI Arsenal

Detecting spam with Perceptrons

One of the first concrete and successful applications of AI in the field of cybersecurity was spam detection, and one of the most famous open source tools is SpamAssassin.

The strategies that can be implemented for effective spam detection are different, as we will see in the course of the chapter, but the most common and simpler one uses Neural Networks (NNs) in the most basic form; that is, the Perceptron.

Spam detection also provides us with the opportunity to introduce theoretical concepts related to NNs in a gradual and accessible way, starting with the Perceptron.

Meet NNs at their purest – the Perceptron

The peculiar characteristic that unites all NNs (regardless of their implementation...