IBM supercomputer teams with universities in fight against cyber crime

The IBM Watson supercomputer has turned to address the skills gap in cyber security by working with a number of universities. Together, they hope to establish a system designed to help cyber security analysts find data patterns that can indicate cyber attacks more quickly.

IBM has developed the research project, ‘Watson for Cyber Security’, which will see Watson being fed large volumes of data that relates to cyber security research over a 20-year period. The study includes data on more than 100,000 flaws, along with 8 million phishing and spam attacks, for a 12-month research project.

IBM, in a move designed to help train Watson, is teaming with University of New Brunswick, University of Waterloo, University of Ottawa, UMBC, California State Polytechnic University Pomona, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, and MIT. These eight universities teach the best cyber security programmes in the world and will utilise Watson to demonstrate cognitive computing to students.

IBM Security General Manager, Marc van Zadelhoff, said:

“By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations, and knowledge to security professionals, bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cyber security analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training.”

The move will ensure that the next generation of cyber experts will have a more complex understanding of cyber security, which can only help UK firms protect themselves against widespread breaches. They will need to reprioritise their IT security recruitment drive to ensure that they take advantage of such expertise.