The increase of cybercrime has been dramatic over the past decade with more cybercriminals able to access private information and data using different technologies and techniques. This makes it such a challenge to fight against these cyber threats, as there seem to be so many different utilities at criminals’ disposal.
However, there have been big developments in cybersecurity with artificial intelligence (AI) playing a huge role in attempting to halt these cyber attacks. Natural language processing (NLP) is one piece of AI that has been used recently to combat attempts to steal personal data. NLP allows security professionals to analyse vital information from textual data that can bolster a business’s cybersecurity.
Further advancements in NLP technology should eventually see the near elimination of cyberattacks, as more cybersecurity mechanisms are being created every day. With that being said, let’s explore some of the ways that NLP is benefitting cybersecurity and helps prevent future cyberattacks for good.
Key Components of NLP
Before diving into how NLP
can be used to protect data from cyber threats, it is essential to have a basic
understanding of the technology. Let's look at a few of these essential NLP
components and how they are used to analyse data:
● Tokenization: Analysing data is a lot more efficient when it is broken down into smaller pieces of information. This is useful when dealing with large databases, as it can be split into smaller parts.
● Named Entity Recognition (NER): This is a form of categorisation analysis by looking at information such as names, locations and organisations. It can help with finding out which pieces of information are relevant.
● Sentiment Analysis: Every piece of textual data has an emotional tone that is being expressed. It can identify threats that are hidden behind different layers of language.
● Topic Modelling: Topics and themes can be picked out from a collection of documents. This can be used to identify trends or continuous discussions related to security threats.
● Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging: This assigns grammatical tags to words in a sentence or paragraph. It can help with understanding the syntactic structure of the text and can detect any suspicious patterns.
Analysing data from a wider
range of sources can help with gathering more useful textual data that will
help combat cyber attacks. NLP can identify patterns and extract all the
relevant information from news articles, social media, forums and IoT (Internet of Things) to
offer the best analysis possible. This can help with monitoring any potential
threats to an individual’s or business’s private data and allow for better
planning to help stop future attacks.
Both phishing emails and
websites are some of the most popular cyber attacks that are being carried out
by criminals looking to steal private information. NLP can be used to identify
these phishing attempts by analysing emails and websites that contain words
that are associated with phishing attempts. The technology can then identify if
something seems suspicious and will recommend that you avoid it by alerting you
of the issue.
Being able to spot any anomalies in communication patterns can play a big part in helping prevent cyber attacks. Cybercriminals will often carry out bank scams to steal private information and assets from their victims. Banks follow strict communication protocols when talking with customers and to prevent any cyber threats, NLP can detect if there are any anomalies in these communications. For example, if there are any typos or grammatical errors that are out of the ordinary, this form of AI can pick them out and alert you if it’s considered suspicious.
If you have fallen victim to
a cyber attack, you need to respond quickly to fully recover. NLP helps
dramatically with the forensic analysis process to track down and identify any
crucial information that can be used to help respond to a cyber attack. It can
dig through logs, incident reports and transcripts of communication to locate
anything that can stop you from being victimised in the future.
The emergence of NLP has offered hope in counteracting the threats caused by cyberattacks like phishing emails and bank scams. Analysing textual data and picking out the key information and anomalies can help individuals and businesses be notified of anything that is considered to be suspicious. These pieces of information are often overlooked by individuals who are not aware of the existing cyber threats, so these AI technologies can be very beneficial to them.
NLP technology has the ability to drastically change the cybersecurity scene, and this will become more and more evident as it develops over the coming years. It presents a viable option for protecting our virtual environment and building a safer place where our assets are kept out of the hands of hackers. Essentially, the possibilities are endless.
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