Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Watson Morphs Into Sherlock to Take On Cybersecurity

May 11, 2016

If you are familiar with Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, you know he was, outside of medicine, not frightfully keen on other subjects. But IBM’s Watson (decidedly a horse of another color) is so brilliant that ZDNet reports that IBM plans to work with eight universities to train its Watson cognitive computing system to collect and understand security data.

The goal is to create Watson for Cybersecurity – to give cybersecurity professionals a Watson-based assistant to defend against threats. Such a Watson would help address the cybersecurity skills gap. Watson for Cyber Security would presumably find patterns and thwart hidden cyberattacks that would have otherwise been missed.

Key points:

  • Watson for Cyber Security aims to process the 80 percent of data that is unstructured in attacks. Security tools don't address unstructured data and the average organization only uses 8 percent of the total.
  • Students will feed security reports and data into Watson as well as annotations.
  • IBM will process up to 15,000 security documents a month for the next phase of training.
  • Watson will build out a taxonomy for cybersecurity.

IBM's argument is that Watson can help process the average company's 200,000 security events a day (that’s got to be a BIG company) and be an aid to analysts.

The universities partnering with IBM include California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo.

Watson for Cybersecurity will start by devouring IBM's X-Force security research library. IBM said it plans to have beta deployments later this year. As always, I am excited to see what Watson (with a new Sherlock digital twist) can do next.

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