Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to flip the cyber threat landscape paradigm by helping defenders better mitigate future threats, a senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said on Thursday.
During a Jan. 25 Palo Alto Network webinar, La’Naia Jones, CIA’s chief information officer (CIO) and director of Information Technology Enterprise, explained that AI has the capability to help cyber defenders rapidly deduce threats and limit risk factors.
“We’re looking at the technology to be able to more rapidly and quickly deduce threats and give insights to protect data information and to limit those risk factors,” Jones said. “It is about mitigation. The more technology that we can use to prevent an attack before it happens the better protected is our infrastructure.”
According to Jones, mitigation is particularly important when protecting data information within the intelligence community (IC).
“The nature of the IC includes various operating levels that have various protections and caveats and even added auditing and ability because of the sensitivity of the data and information,” she said.
AI can pull together that “robust framework and environment” to help mitigate risk and limit the attack factors for adversaries, Jones said.
In addition to using AI for cybersecurity, the intelligence agency is also turning to emerging tech to grasp a better picture of data located at various operating levels throughout the agency and the IC.
“The goal is to look at how technology or how AI can be used to understand the data information … across multiple sectors, whatever it may be and whatever the datasets may be. The datasets may change, the customers may change but the AI capability may stay the same,” Jones said.
