The Role AI Plays in Safeguarding Government Data

The Role AI Plays in Safeguarding Government Data

The U.S. government is tasked with protecting classified data and combating potential threats, an area of growing concern with the increasing use of web-based applications required for remote working. Due to high demands, the teams tasked with safeguarding data need a new way—or new capabilities—to scale cybersecurity efforts, especially as many government agencies also face the challenge of limited resources and massively growing data sets and feeds.


Pushed by the pandemic, governments are accelerating digital transformation efforts to implement artificial intelligence for cybersecurity needs, as it brings capabilities beyond what manual human surveillance can provide. In fact, the Defense Department’s investment in AI has increased from $600 million in fiscal 2016 to $2.5 billion in fiscal 2021.


Today’s Cybersecurity Challenges


The security operations center is the “mothership” of security within government agencies. It’s responsible for monitoring, preventing, and responding to cybersecurity threats in real time, and Security and Governance Risk and Compliance are tasked with classifying and protecting sensitive data.


Traditionally, security and data governance teams code pattern heuristics, a scanning method that looks for malware-like behavior patterns that need to be monitored based on past risk events. These heuristics are applied to log files and data to alert for any pattern matched. For example, if a person uses their credentials on a new computer, or if credentials are compromised, the team is alerted. This manual process can result in missing other important events, and also provides a high rate of false positives. Too many low-value events, like credential alerts, can also distract from more severe security events. 


Security teams continue to face resource limitations when it comes to being able to monitor data as well. For exa ..

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