{"id":396,"date":"2017-04-12T11:50:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T11:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eset-blog.aist.fun\/dont-buy-the-elixir-of-youth-machine-learning-is-not-magic\/"},"modified":"2019-05-29T12:17:09","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T12:17:09","slug":"dont-buy-the-elixir-of-youth-machine-learning-is-not-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.eset.ee\/et\/en\/2017\/04\/12\/dont-buy-the-elixir-of-youth-machine-learning-is-not-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t buy the elixir of youth: Machine learning is not magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

If someone told you they had a magic elixir that would heal all your illnesses or injuries, and make you young again, would you believe them? No matter how medieval this marketing trick might sound, it is still in use, even in the data-driven 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, it\u2019s not street vendors selling the elixir of youth anymore. They have been replaced by an array of \u201cpost-truth\u201d cybersecurity companies<\/a> offering mysterious artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).<\/p>\n

These technologies, you are told, will keep your business safe from any malware and other threats \u2013 regardless of whether it\u2019s been seen before, or is completely new. But, of course, these techniques are way too complicated to explain or properly understand. They\u2019re almost magical.<\/p>\n

Back here on Earth, we can report that there is no magic behind AI or machine learning. The former term has been around for more than 60 years and represents the ideal of a generally intelligent machine that can learn and make decisions independently, based only on inputs from its environment \u2013 all without human supervision.<\/p>\n

A step back from this as-yet unachievable AI dream, there is machine learning, a field of computer science that gives computers the ability to find patterns in huge amounts of data, by sorting them and acting on the findings. The concept might be a little newer, but it still has been present in cybersecurity since the 90s.<\/p>\n

If you feel lost and can\u2019t relate, just remember when Facebook found your face in that party photo? That was machine learning. Or when Netflix suggested a great movie? Also ML.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn cybersecurity, machine learning mostly refers to one of the technologies built into a solution that has been fed large amounts of correctly labeled clean and malicious samples \u2013 and has learned the difference.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In cybersecurity, machine learning mostly refers to one of the technologies built into a solution that has been fed large amounts of correctly labeled clean and malicious samples, and has learned the difference. Thanks to this training \u2013 also known as supervised machine learning \u2013 it is able to analyze and identify most of the potential threats to users and act proactively to mitigate them.<\/p>\n

Automation of this process makes the security solution faster and helps human experts handle the exponential growth in the number of samples appearing every day.<\/p>\n

Algorithms that lack this training \u2013 which fall into the category of unsupervised machine learning \u2013 are almost useless for cybersecurity.<\/p>\n

The reason is that they sort the data into their own categories, which don\u2019t necessarily distinguish between clean items and malware and are instead better suited to finding similarities or anomalies in the dataset invisible to the human eye.<\/p>\n

At ESET \u2013 an established cybersecurity vendor with almost three decades of experience \u2013 we have been applying supervised machine learning for years. We call it \u201cautomated detection\u201d.<\/p>\n

To keep our detection rates high and false positives low, a team of experienced human supervisors evaluate items that are too divergent from other samples, and hence hard for ML to label. This approach allows us to avoid the pitfalls of false positives or misses that might occur on the way to a fine-tuned algorithm that works well with other protective technologies under the hood of our solutions.<\/p>\n

So, to wrap up \u2013 there is no magic in machine learning. It is a well-established technology which \u2013 under human supervision \u2013 learns how to extract features and find specific patterns in huge quantities of malicious and clean data, and which already helps us to protect millions of ESET users worldwide for years.<\/p>\n

The whole series:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Editorial: Fighting post-truth with reality in cybersecurity<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. What is machine learning and artificial intelligence?<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Most frequent misconceptions about ML and AI<\/li>\n
  4. Why ML-based security doesn\u2019t scare intelligent adversaries<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Why one line of cyberdefense is not enough, even if it\u2019s machine learning<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. Chasing ghosts: The real costs of high false positive rates in cybersecurity<\/li>\n
  7. How updates make your security solution stronger<\/li>\n
  8. We know ML, we\u2019ve been using it for over a decade<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    With contribution of Jakub Debski & Peter Kosinar<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

    Source: WeLiveSecurity<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Nowadays, it\u2019s not street vendors selling the elixir of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDon\u2019t buy the elixir of youth: Machine learning is not magic - ESET Eesti Blogi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.eset.ee\/et\/en\/2017\/04\/12\/dont-buy-the-elixir-of-youth-machine-learning-is-not-magic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Don\u2019t buy the elixir of youth: Machine learning is not magic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If someone told you they had a magic elixir that would heal all your illnesses or injuries, and make you young again, would you believe them? 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