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Cisco introduces AI assistant to bolster cybersecurity

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 16 Jan 2024
Jeetu Patel, VP, security and collaboration, Cisco.
Jeetu Patel, VP, security and collaboration, Cisco.

Cisco Systems, this week, launched its AI assistant for security, officially called the Cisco AI Assistant for Security, which was originally unveiled in December 2023.

The networking giant says the AI assistant will enhance decision-making, automate tasks, and strengthen defences across networks, devices, and applications.

It adds that the development of the tool marks a major step in making AI pervasive in the Cisco security cloud platform.

Leveraging Cisco’s security portfolio, the AI assistant is trained on a large security-focused data set, which analyses more than 550 billion security events each day across web, email, endpoints, networks and applications.

The assistant can also understand event triage, impact and scope, root-cause analysis and policy design.

Jeetu Patel, VP, security and collaboration, Cisco said launching the AI assistant is a big step forward to help tip the scales in favour of defenders.

The AI tool offers a layered approach to combating ransomware from early detection and prevention to response and remediation.

According to the recently published Cisco Talos 2023 Year in Review report, ransomware and extortion attacks persist, making up 20 percent of Cisco Talos Incident Response engagements last year. Talos also observed an increase in sophisticated attacks on networking devices this past year, particularly by state-sponsored actors.

The company has also introduced:

  • AI Assistant for Firewall Policy: The Cisco AI Assistant for Security is first going live within the Cisco Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Centre and Cisco Defence Orchestrator, to help administrators with setting and maintaining complex policies and firewall rules.
  • AI-powered Encrypted Visibility Engine for all firewall models: The engine leverages billions of samples, including sandboxed malware samples, to determine if the encrypted traffic is transporting malware. It can tell which operating system the traffic is coming from and what client application is generating it, without the need for decryption.

Cisco says the tool is currently in limited released with availability being afforded to customers using compatible Cisco security tools, such as the Cisco Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Centre and the Cisco Defense Orchestrator.

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