Page 35 - Cyber Warnings

Deep Learning: An Artificial Brain that Protects Against Any

Cyber-Attack

By Guy Caspi, CEO, Deep Instinct

Sometimes we do things “without thinking” and take for granted that we can do them. When you
see a picture of a dog, you identify it immediately, in real-time and with high confidence. Even if
a percentage of the pixels is modified, you will still easily recognize that the image is that of a
dog, in no less time and in the same degree of confidence.

This is not the case for cybersecurity solutions. Hundreds of thousands of new malware are
launched daily, with nearly all of them based on small mutations of known malware (by some
estimates the vast majority of new malware are mutated by less than two percent in comparison
to known malware).

Yet, many security solutions are incapable of detecting most of them. With so many breaches
reported on almost a daily basis, is there a way to combat these zero-day threats? We believe
that the answer is yes and it lies in applying deep learning.

Deep learning is a novel branch of artificial intelligence that is inspired by the brain’s ability to
learn. Once a brain learns to identify an object, its identification becomes second nature — the
dog is recognized.

When applied to cybersecurity, deep learning facilitates new predictive capabilities of detecting,
with unmatched accuracy, any type of cyber threat, including malware that has never been seen
before.

Most current detection methods fail to detect new malware and APT (Advanced Persistent
Threats, the most a sophisticated malware) because they rely on manually-tuned heuristics.

More advanced solutions use manually selected features, which are then fed into classical
machine learning modules to classify the file as malicious or legitimate (and even then the
malware detection rates are abysmal).

Several methods rely on running the malware in a sandbox environment to obtain more
information about it. While this allows for more accurate detection it comes at the cost of
protection, due to the time consuming process.

Deep learning has shown groundbreaking results, even compared to classical machine learning,
in detecting first-seen malware, superseding any solution currently available on the market. In
deep learning, it takes just a few milliseconds to feed the technology with raw data and pass it
through the deep neural network to obtain the prediction.

35 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – April 2016 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide