Mind-reading AI is the newest defense against cyber attacks

Ransomware has been disastrous for businesses and individuals alike, with recent attacks like WannaCry costing companies millions, and personal attacks threatening private data. We’re all at risk. Criminals are holding data and information hostage using tools that require almost no skill, and once they have your files it’s too late to react.

Empow, a security startup, just patented a ‘mind-reading’ approach to cyber-security in order to try and discover these attacks the moment they start. CEO and Founder Avi Chesla says today in a press release:

The innovative technology behind the patent enables a human security expert to understand actual the intentions of any attacker. This “mind reading” is accomplished initially by data gathering – we read the data generated by a variety of tools inside the organization – which is then enriched by Internet data sources which yield more signals and cues. These are harvested from good guys and bad. On top of that we apply of NLP algorithms to draw definitive conclusions about what the attacker is after. No one signal lets us read the attackers’ mind, but we connected the dots to generate intention.

The AI uses all the data it can gather to determine what an attack might look like, specific to the system it is protecting, and constantly monitors everything happening on the entire network. When it doesn’t have enough data from internal sources, it begins searching outside of your network for information that fills in the gaps.

It learns to understand what suspicious behavior looks like at the moment it starts. This allows it to react within the first couple of seconds of an attack with a solution tailored to best defend your network and data. The AI is like a guard dog that comes well-trained and never stops learning how to do a better job of guarding your assets.

It’s getting easier to hack networks or compromise accounts and harder to secure them. There’s an arms race going on between criminals and computer systems that requires improvement in leaps that go beyond virus definition updates and malware protection.

Empow’s patented mind-reading AI won’t tell you what you’re thinking, but if it brings bigger guns in the fight against cyber-attacks it’ll be far more important than a crystal ball.