Security News > 2020 > December > Why cybersecurity tools fail when it comes to ambiguity

"Cybersecurity is very good at identifying activities that are black or white-either obviously bad and dangerous or clearly good and safe," writes Margaret Cunningham, PhD, psychologist and principal research scientist at Forcepoint's Innovation Lab, in her research paper Exploring the Gray Space of Cybersecurity with Insights from Cognitive Science.

"But, traditional cybersecurity tools struggle with ambiguity-our algorithms are not always able to analyze all salient variables and make a confident decision whether to allow or block risky actions."

The success of cybercriminals, admits Cunningham, is in large part due to their ability to quickly morph attack tools, and cybersecurity tech cannot keep pace.

Still, Cunningham believes we are better at coping with ambiguity than machines, especially when presented with something never before experienced.

"By using expert knowledge of the cybersecurity landscape of threats, along with expert knowledge in engineering analytic systems that can quickly and accurately reason about and make judgments with ambiguous information, cybersecurity will become better at both making sense of challenging signals and allowing people to continue to work within connected systems uninterrupted."

News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-cybersecurity-tools-fail-when-it-comes-to-ambiguity/#ftag=RSS56d97e7