Fortinet Anticipates Threat Actors to Leverage AI, Machine Learning in 2019

Fortinet’s threat research arm predicts cyber adversaries will exploit artificial intelligence and machine learning to launch attacks on organizations’ networks and other information technology infrastructure in 2019 and beyond.

Researchers from FortiGuard Labs expect cyber criminals to accelerate zero-day attacks through the use of the AI fuzzing technique, the company said Thursday.

AI fuzzing works to detect vulnerabilities in software and hardware interfaces and applications by introducing semi-random or invalid data in a program.

“Rather than engaging in a perpetual arms race, organizations need to embrace automation and AI to shrink the windows from intrusion-to-detection and from detection-to-containment,” said Derek Manky, head of security insights and global threat alliances at Fortinet.

“This can be achieved by integrating security elements into a cohesive security fabric that dynamically shares threat information for broad protection and visibility across every network segment from IoT to multi-clouds.”

Another strategy that threat actors can leverage is the poisoning machine learning method that allows adversaries to train systems against deploying patches to a device or recording specific traffic in order to avoid detection.

Organizations could also see a rise in the use of swarm-as-a-service method that cyber attackers can use to form large swarms of bots to autonomously compromise networks in a collaborative manner, Fortinet noted.