​Universities to help Watson tackle cybercrime

IBM is recruiting eight US universities to help train Watson for Cyber Security, a new cloud-based version of its cognitive technology.

Big Blue said on Wednesday that Watson is learning the nuances of security research findings, and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber threats that could otherwise be missed.

The company will soon begin working with the following universities to further train Watson on the language of cyber security.

This universities are California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Pennsylvania State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of New Brunswick, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Waterloo.

Watson for Cyber Security is part of a project to address the cyber security skills gap. It is being designed to improve security analysts’ capabilities using cognitive systems that automate the connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies, IBM said.

Quoting its own 2015 Cybersecurity Intelligence Index, IBM said the average organisation sees more than 200,000 pieces of security event data per day. The Index shows enterprises are spending $1.3 million per year dealing with false positives alone, wasting 21,000 hours.

Watson for Cyber Security is the first technology to offer cognition of security data at scale, using Watson’s ability to reason and learn from unstructured data. This is 80 per cent of the data on the Internet that traditional security tools can’t process such as blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts, and other information.

The technology uses natural language processing to understand the vague and imprecise nature of human language in unstructured data, IBM said.

It also incorporates Watson’s data mining techniques for outlier detection, graphical presentation tools and techniques for finding connections between related data points in different documents.

For example, Watson can find data on an emerging form of malware in an online security bulletin, and data from a security analyst’s blog on an emerging remediation strategy.

“Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager at IBM Security said in a statement.

“The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime.”

IBM plans to begin beta production deployments that take advantage of the solution later this year.