Sometimes the best way to stop a bad machine is with a lot of good machines.
Several companies are applying the techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) to the world of security and they are using a whole bunch of machines strung together in so-called cloud computing networks to do it. Originally the province of university researchers, and now one of the ways Google and other companies figure out what is going on across the Web, AI technology is being employed by security companies, who say they can beat criminals by using many of the same strategies.
Much as Google examines Web sites for significant information and watches the behavior of people searching and surfing the Web, AI security companies look for malicious sites or try to examine and predict the behavior of malware, which is software meant to cause problems.
Illustration: Yusha
“We are looking at about 200,000 samples of malicious code a day, so we can guard maybe 11 million events in a microsecond,” said Tomer Weingarten, the chief executive of a computer security company called SentinelOne.
Staying on top of that volume requires the equivalent of 10,000 computers, Weingarten said.
As computing becomes more pervasive, traditional defenses are proving inadequate. For example, the firewall, which was once an effective safeguard on the perimeter between a corporate network and the world, is now problematic: It has become harder to say where systems begin and end as they become connected to more and more things. In 2013, Target was hacked when criminals entered the main servers through software for a company heating system that was managed by a contractor.
More recently, “sandboxes” have been developed that temporarily isolate incoming programs and files to see if they try something malicious. In response, hackers have written code enabling malware to recognize that it is being quarantined — sometimes by contacting a computer’s operating system directly — so it does not take any suspicious action until it detects that it has been released.
Every day, SentinelOne’s computers scour the many listings worldwide of known malware and attack codes, which are publicly posted by government agencies and private security organizations. Using machine learning, an AI technique of pattern mapping, the computers then look for similarities with known techniques and try to identify similar behaviors that precede attacks.
That information is then loaded into computing “agents” that are inside its clients’ computers. The agents observe events inside a computer almost the moment they occur. If, for instance, a so-called “ransomware” program starts to encrypt a user’s files — to lock up the computer, which will be freed only once the owner pays a ransom — the agent will isolate the program and notify the system administrator.
Often, it can also undo whatever damage was caused by reverting the few files that were affected to an earlier state.
“Sometimes it is easy to see malicious behavior — no legitimate application would just start encrypting everything,” Weingarten said. “Other times, they are ‘spraying the heap,’ looking for all the commands being queued up in the computer so they can rewrite the system and insert their code. Normal applications do not do these things.”
Every piece of malware also has its own biography within the system. Weingarten recently called up a program called Troldesh, which was first observed on the evening of April 9. It created files on the infected computer, then changed the files and notified a server in Russia that it was ready.
“This starts to look suspicious,” Weingarten said.
Signals can be bounced around, so it is hard to say just where Troldesh originated. It also communicated with machines in Hungary, Austria and Germany.
Troldesh was identified and stopped, but a hacker could reuse much of the code in other malware. That is why AI tries to learn hackers’ rules and habits.
Another challenge in protecting today’s computer networks is how poorly understood much of the world’s software is.
“There are 600 million individual files known to be good and a malware universe of about 400 million files, but there are also 100 million pieces of potentially unwanted adware and 200 million software packages that just are not known. It takes a lot of talent to figure out what is normal and what is not,” Gartner analyst Lawrence Pingree said.
The process, which he called “endpoint detection,” looks at and acts on what goes on in individual machines.
Many of the same techniques can also be used on other kinds of bad online behavior. Carlos Guestrin, a well-regarded expert in machine learning, is chief executive and cofounder of a company called Dato. In addition to traditional AI businesses, such as figuring out shopping preferences, he started looking at fraudulent behaviors.
“We caught spam with machine learning by looking at sequences of words. Now, we look for the code in a virus, like DNA, that makes it do unusual things,” Guestrin said. “With human fraud, you look for relationships about who sends money to who, or who is hiding fraudulent transactions. If a finite number of people keep sending each other money, they are probably trying to look like legitimate businesses.”
G2 Web Services, based in Bellevue, Washington, helps banks figure out if a Web site is fraudulent or is selling contraband. Using Guestrin’s product, coupled with human experience, on hundreds of millions of sites, G2 improved its ability to predict fraud and crime by 13 percent. Over millions of transactions, that amounts to quite a lot.
G2 can also flag prohibited content, like child pornography, which exists on about 1.5 percent of all merchant Web sites. Sometimes a criminal would put a link to a store for illegal growth hormones in an otherwise honest site, without the merchants ever knowing about the link placement. Another use for AI is spotting “transaction laundering,” in which an illegal business tries to appear legitimate by processing transactions through a legal site.
The company is making strides against cybercrime, as “the guys who run these illicit sites are also into viruses and malware,” G2 principal data scientist Alan Krumholz said. “It is a cat-and-mouse game. They go from one business into another.”
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US