Bridging the Cybersecurity Gap: How AI Turns Operational Strain into Business Resilience

AI in cybersecurity is essential in order to keep pace with bad actors and plug the  skills gap. Before, a couple of experts who could manage basic antivirus and firewalls sufficed. But large-scale attacks such as NotPetya, WannaCry and SUNBURST, have proven that basic defenses are not enough. On the offense, AI can facilitate faster, more expansive attacks. But defensively, it can also bridge the skills gap by equipping everyday users and businesses with advanced capabilities to counter these threats. If democratized, cybersecurity AI will make it so that the everyday  business has a fair chance of defending itself.

Today, there is a global shortage of skilled and experienced security professionals. More than 40% of InfoSec pros say their organization’s security teams are “somewhat” or “significantly” understaffed, while half say theoretical knowledge gained in education was useless in their current job. Prepared security pros are scarce, and regardless, many organizations cannot afford them, making a 24/7 security operations center (SOC) a pipe dream. Compounding the skills shortage is staff burnout. Head of Unified Platform at Kaspersky Ilya Markelov says,

“When a cybersecurity professional is doing their job well, their day-to-day work should be largely routine – checking logs, reviewing accounts, checking rules, ensuring policy compliance, etc. Although these may not be complex tasks, they are critical.” 

The skills shortage, alongside the complexity of modern threats, has made manual monitoring and response unviable for most businesses. Incidents that could have been detected early are therefore going unnoticed, resulting in financial losses for businesses everywhere.

This is exactly why Kaspersky is guided by its “True to Business” philosophy. Instead of demanding more resources, time and specialized skills that organizations simply don’t have, they believe security must adapt to business. By leveraging AI to automate the heavy lifting they aim to  transform cybersecurity from a resource-draining operational headache into a seamless enabler of growth.

Translating complexity into clarity

Kaspersky has been developing AI-powered cybersecurity for over two decades. Its machine learning (ML) models are trained on global threat intelligence and leverage a huge amount of telemetry. They can identify the most critical alerts from its monitoring systems, ensuring customers can focus on serious threats. But,Kaspersky considers this expertise useless unless it’s widely available. The company’s philosophy is that every business has a right to world-class security and that the more secure organizations are collectively, the safer we all are.

“Another good example of our AI in action is the Kaspersky security information event management (SIEM) system,” Markelov says. “If there’s a log containing a cybersecurity event, the user sees the event as an encrypted string, which is completely unintelligible. This is because malware operators try to hide their presence in logs by encrypting their commands. But our AI module decodes these commands from the garbled strings and explains what the script will do – in readable language that’s easy to understand.”

Kaspersky attests that everything it does with AI has the customer in mind, with a heavy focus  on ease of deployment, intuitive dashboards and proactive protection that simplifies the lives of security teams.

Security that scales without the overhead

Small-to-medium sized businesses may lack the budget or expertise to maintain a dedicated security team. Kaspersky AI-driven solutions can help them detect threats including malware, ransomware and phishing automatically without constant human intervention, meaning they can strengthen their security without hiring in.

Its systems also integrate seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure and can provide real-time alerts for suspicious activity, even taking automated steps to neutralize threats. This means its customers can protect themselves with minimal effort and cost – like having their own virtual analyst.

Enterprises face increasing complexity – not only as they adopt new systems but also as they are targeted in more advanced attacks. Kaspersky’s AI and automation can equip their security teams to manage this increasing workload, eliminating the need for proportionate growth and, ultimately, saving money.

“The value lies in reducing the workload on the team, lowering skill requirements and maximizing efficiency through automation,” Markelov continues. “AI doesn’t replace analysts, but allows them to focus on critical tasks instead of getting bogged down in routine.”

Building resilience through trustworthy AI

Kaspersky wants AI cybersecurity to benefit all, which means those using it must be able to trust it. Secure AI development and application is therefore critical to its strategy because it ensures its algorithms are trustworthy and resilient. It trains its AI under strict security standards, for example, so you know its detections are never manipulated, and works hard to negate exploitation.

Elsewhere, its dedicated research unit, the Kaspersky AI Technology Research Center, unites data scientists, MLengineers, threat experts and infrastructure specialists to tackle the most challenging tasks at the intersection of AI/ML and cybersecurity. This includes developing applied technologies and research into the security of AI algorithms.

Ultimately, the True to Business approach means that every innovation, algorithm and research breakthrough is designed with one clear goal: to protect users’ most important assets  without adding operational friction. By delivering AI that is as transparent as it is powerful, Kaspersky aims to ensure that its clients’ security posture drives their business forward, rather than holding them back.  

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