Empowering Security Analysts With Generative AI Tools

Abstract

The advancement and proliferation of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and models is noticeable in recent digital transformation. Several generative AI tools, such as, ChatGPT, CoPilot, Bard have become famous and received widespread adoption and usage. The popularity of generative AI in every sector reflects its potential to boost the cybersecurity domain as well, particularly to serve security analysts. Despite the ethical, social, and privacy implications of generative AI, it can be effectively utilized in various ways. Recent reports have indicated the use of generative AI tools in both offensive and defensive sides of cybersecurity. Where the use of generative AI by the attackers can lead to an increase in the number and quality of attacks, it can also be applied in the same way to empower the defenders to better analyze the attacks and develop advanced security practices. In this chapter, the role of security analysts in identifying and mitigating cyber threats has been presented along with the role of generative AI and its potential to empower their tasks. In addition, the challenges faced by security analysts are elaborated, including information overload, alert fatigue, and the complexity of modern cyber-attacks. Moreover, a discussion is provided on how generative AI can enhance threat detection, incident response, and threat intelligence analysis. Furthermore, the characteristics of generative AI to support anomaly detection, pattern recognition, visualization and interpretation of security data, automated threat simulation and response along with the case studies have been presented. Lastly, the ethical and legal considerations as well as the future directions and emerging trends of the transformative potential of generative AI for empowering cybersecurity operations have been discussed. Overall, this research is an effort towards exploring the positive prospective of generative AI tools for not only increasing the robustness of security practices but also to empower the capabilities of security analysts.