Robots for Cybersecurity?

In terms of cybersecurity, which of the two will persevere: human knowledge, or an automated defense/reaction system? According to a number of computer science researchers, citizens, and the White House, the latter seems to be the better option for several reasons. First, it provides instantaneous scriptish responses to an attack and reciprocate with configured responses. Second, it carters less burden to ensure up-to-date security patches, configurations, and security prompts to the first-control administrator. Lastly, there is a consistent action/reactions with only room for improvements. Opposed to human resources, an automated system garners equal, non-discriminant measures ubiquitously. With the implementation, human specialists gets to audit only the important, filtered tasks that maximizes the efficiency of human-to-machine model. In other words, human resources are not ignored; they are simply brought to their superlative efficiency.

Using a simple risk management model comprised of identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks, the risk management model explains the necessity of an automated system. To start with, in a fast-pacing environment of corporate businesses, time is lost identifying low-level problems. With three tiers of auditing, lowest and mid-level tiers of problems - port scanning or obscure incoming connections, for example - the admin is simply notified with details of the problem. From there, the assessment takes place. Each problem is assessed, or valued, accordingly, which, only a prioritized list is sent, without a compilation of proliferating issues.

The rising question regarding an automated system to effectively measure problems could pose following questions: what are the implications of an “automated” system - can it efficaciously thwart all problems? What if the system is compromised - how quickly can human resources respond and fix it? In an interview conducted by Nextgov, Michael Daniel, the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, suggests a need to improve automated processes by saying, “You’re going to have to automate a lot more of the process … you’ll never take people out of the loop entirely. … But I think that to the largest extent that we can make the cybersecurity just there and transparent to the users.” Although perfect online security can hardly be achieved, the possible symbiotic relationship will provide the required infeasibility to circumvent breach of data, causality which have been augmented recently.