Book Image

10 Machine Learning Blueprints You Should Know for Cybersecurity

By : Rajvardhan Oak
4 (1)
Book Image

10 Machine Learning Blueprints You Should Know for Cybersecurity

4 (1)
By: Rajvardhan Oak

Overview of this book

Machine learning in security is harder than other domains because of the changing nature and abilities of adversaries, high stakes, and a lack of ground-truth data. This book will prepare machine learning practitioners to effectively handle tasks in the challenging yet exciting cybersecurity space. The book begins by helping you understand how advanced ML algorithms work and shows you practical examples of how they can be applied to security-specific problems with Python – by using open source datasets or instructing you to create your own. In one exercise, you’ll also use GPT 3.5, the secret sauce behind ChatGPT, to generate an artificial dataset of fabricated news. Later, you’ll find out how to apply the expert knowledge and human-in-the-loop decision-making that is necessary in the cybersecurity space. This book is designed to address the lack of proper resources available for individuals interested in transitioning into a data scientist role in cybersecurity. It concludes with case studies, interview questions, and blueprints for four projects that you can use to enhance your portfolio. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to apply machine learning algorithms to detect malware, fake news, deep fakes, and more, along with implementing privacy-preserving machine learning techniques such as differentially private ML.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Machine learning – cybersecurity versus other domains

ML today is applied to a wide variety of domains, some of which are detailed in the following list:

  • In sales and marketing, to identify the segment of customers likely to buy a particular product
  • In online advertising, for click prediction and to display ads accordingly
  • In climate and weather forecasting, to predict trends based on centuries of data
  • In recommendation systems, to find the best items (movies, songs, posts, and people) relevant to a user

While every sector imaginable applies ML today, the nuances of it being applied to cybersecurity are different from other fields. In the following subsections, we will see some of the reasons why it is much more challenging to apply ML to the cybersecurity domain than to other domains such as sales or advertising.

High stakes

Security problems often involve making crucial decisions that can impact money, resources, and even life. A fraud detection...