Eight universities will be working with IBM and a cloud based version of Watson to better understand how to detect and fight cybercime. The computer will be fed huge amounts of data and system security reports including IMB’s X-Force library which contains more than 100K of documented vulnerabilities. They hope this will also bridge gaps in knowledge of individuals working in IT security. One of Watson’s pluses is that it can work with unstructured data, since the average organization works with only 8% of the unstructured data available. As it turns out, that 8% makes up 80% of the data used in attacks. Watson uses NLP (natural language processing) so it will be able to go through text in blogs and news reports to determine potential threats.

“Currently, Watson for Cyber Security is designed to reveal emerging threats and potential ways of dealing with them. Although, there is no word yet on whether or not Watson will eventually be able to stop cyberattacks or prevent them on its own.” – TechRepublic

This is a big step. Cognitive computing has made inroads in healthcare (and yeah, Watson was Jeopardy champion). But seriously, this might prove to be a good thing.

But it will not be fed (as far as I can tell), info from cyber warfare and counter warfare. These are folks who find and exploit weaknesses for governments. I’m not saying this is valid or not, but it is well known that in order to fulfill their missions, they discuss whether to fix or not fix vulnerabilities which have the potential to affect all of us adversely (http://drjbhl.joeuser.com/article/477110/The_new_Federal_Reserve_-_Zero_Day_Vulnerabilities).

Anyway, I hope they won’t compromise Watson protecting us…if it can. Just remember, you still have to do what you should to protect yourself and your data.

Have a good weekend!

Source:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-watson-takes-on-cybercrime-with-new-cloud-based-cybersecurity-technology/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=23906934820265111040450294515746