Microsoft will reportedly launch its newest AI-powered cybersecurity tool, Copilot for Security, on April 1. Roughly a year after the tech giant has been carefully testing out the cybersecurity tool to help enhance and automate cybersecurity-related alerts, summaries, and a variety of IT tasks in seconds.
The security Copilot is a component of Microsoft's continuous efforts to convince business clients to subscribe by integrating artificial intelligence capabilities from partner OpenAI into its main product lines.
Microsoft describes the new AI tool as a generative AI-powered security solution that adheres to responsible AI principles while enhancing defenders' effectiveness and capacities to improve security outcomes at machine speed and scale.
(Photo : JOSEP LAGO/AFP via Getty Images)
People visit the US technology company Microsoft's stand during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry's biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 26, 2024.
Security professionals can supposedly benefit from Security Copilot's natural language, and helpful copilot experience in end-to-end scenarios like incident response, threat hunting, intelligence collecting, and posture management. Just like with the company's Azure cloud services, users will pay a price for security Copilot based on consumption.
The new AI tool will reportedly be powered by OpenAI's model, which makes use of security-specific plugins, such as information particular to an organization, reliable sources, and worldwide threat data, to produce a response to a user query. Security experts can extend the functionality of the solution and acquire more information and greater visibility into risks by employing plugins as data point sources.
Battle-Tested Cybersecurity AI
It has been stated that Microsoft has been thoroughly testing Copilot's security by putting corporate clients through trials. Microsoft's vice president of security marketing, Andrew Conway, claims that hundreds of partners and clients are actively serving as testers. Conway adds that the software company has taken extra precautions with this Copilot due to the importance of computer security and its risks.
According to Microsoft, generative AI has just recently been applied to cybersecurity, with Microsoft Security Copilot being among the pioneers in this regard.
According to reports, AI-powered cybersecurity tools have the potential to drastically simplify security for analysts and other security professionals by, combining data to provide actionable recommendations and insights, producing reports and presentations that are easy for analysts to understand and share, and by providing answers in the users' natural language or graphic answers to inquiries about an incident or vulnerability.
AI-Powered Hackers
Although AI has the potential to strengthen cybersecurity, it has long been demonstrated that it also gives hackers unwelcome advantages. Replicas of ChatGPT have reportedly been posted on the dark web to enable a new round of extremely dangerous and AI-driven attacks, according to Tech Radar.
According to reports, attacks are being launched at a speed of seconds and minutes rather than days or weeks, which is much faster than humans can recognize and react to. The report claims that within a day of first accessing an enterprise, fraudsters are distributing ransomware, according to SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit. In 2023, this duration has decreased dramatically from 4.5 days in 2022 and 5.5 days in the previous year.
