Previously, cybercriminals were limited in their approach. With the passage of time, they evolved and firmed their grasp on newer technologies. As a result, they were able to initiate highly sophisticated campaigns against businesses and individuals alike. One such example is of the attack on LapCorps—one of the prominent names in the healthcare industry in the USA.

Over the past few years, the trend has worsened as cybercriminals are directly challenging governments through attacks in cities and town governments. For instance, just a few months ago, the American cities of Atlanta and Baltimore faced city-wide cyberattacks that halted their public services. What’s more worrisome is the fact that authorities have discovered that some of the cyber attacks were backed by other countries, thereby changing the face of modern-day warfare to cyber warfare.

In such challenging times in the cybersecurity industry, the recent advancements in machine learning have made it highly useful against cyber attacks. The entire purpose of machine learning is to “learn” from the past and update itself with the passage of time. This vision is perfectly suited to address cyber attacks where machine learning can learn from the historical data of cyber attacks like the information of their victims, their target industries, their patterns, and other related information and can then use it to prevent any future attacks while evolving at the same time. Following are some of the cases where machine learning has been pretty impressive against some major threats.

Classification

Traditionally, burglars and robbers used to analyze and research targets and carry out crimes accordingly. Today, the situation is the same but the battleground is different as criminals have transformed into cybercriminals. These cybercriminals target specific businesses or persons to infect their servers with a technique called spear phishing.

In order to combat these cyber attacks, several phishing detection solutions have been released albeit with limited success because they do not fare well on the precision and quickness of their actions against such infections. As a consequence, users are left alone to fight off cyber attacks.

Machine learning is providing a breakthrough by using classification to assess recurring hacking patterns and decoding the encrypted emails of the senders. For analysis, ML-based models are trained to pinpoint any anomaly in the punctuation, email headers, body-data, and other relevant metrics. The purpose of these models is to identify whether or not an email is filled with a malicious phishing threat or not.

Traversal Detection Algorithms

Cybercriminals are increasingly keeping an eye on digital users like which websites do they use the most as well as the network of such websites. For instance, consider a restaurant business. As all of the customers order their food on the website of the restaurant, hackers exploit such websites, gain access to private customer data such as credit card details, and misuse the credentials of the visitors. This type of attack is known as a watering hole.

In these types of attacks, machine learning (ML) can be a game-changer by improving the traditional web security. For instance, it can determine if users are going to be forwarded to a dangerous website’s link through the destination path’s traversal. To attain this goal, traversal detection algorithms are integrated in ML. Likewise; ML can look for any sudden or unusual redirecting from a web-page on the host server.

Deep Learning

Ransomware is a type of cyberthreat that paralyzes and effectively locks the data of its victim. In order to provide access to this data, cybercriminals ask for ransom in exchange for data. The data is encrypted through cryptographic algorithms which generate an encryption key and sends it to the command and control center of the cybercriminals.

In such scenarios, a division of machine learning called deep learning is utilized. Deep learning is used to recognize any fresh ransomware threat. Datasets are trained for analyzing the common ransomware behaviors to predict any upcoming ransomware attack.

To make the system learn, a huge amount of ransomware files along with a bigger amount of non-malicious files are needed for training of the model. ML-based algorithms search and identify the major features from the dataset. These attributes are then subdivided in order to initiate the training of the model. Afterward, whenever a ransomware strain attempts to infect a system, the ML tool runs it against the trained model and computes a set of actions to respond to the attack, thereby saving the computer from being locked.

Remote Attacks

When a single computer or multiple computers are targeted by a cybercriminal, it is known as a remote attack. Such a hacker searches for loopholes in the network or the machine to enter a system. Usually, such attacks are carried out to copy sensitive data or completely ravage a network through a malware infection.

Remote attacks can be caused from a DDoS attack. In such types of attack, the server is damaged by repeatedly flooding it with fake requests. Consequently, as the servers are frozen, the cybercriminals make their move.

With machine learning algorithms, these attacks can be thwarted by a thorough analysis of the system behavior and pinpointing of any unusual instances which does not make sense according to the standard network activities. ML algorithms can be empowered to monitor and detect a malicious payload before it is too late.

Webshell

Webshell is a malware threat which facilitates a hacker in accessing and changing the settings of a website from the server’s web root directory. Hence, the cybercriminal has his/her hands on the complete database.

For e-commerce websites, cybercriminals can even get their hands on financial details like credit card data which can be exploited in a wide range of crimes. This is the major reason that webshell is mostly used against e-commerce websites.

By using machine learning, the figures and data of shopping carts can be analyzed and learnt by ML-based models to differ between malicious actions and standard actions. Malicious files can be fed to ML in order to enhance the training and capability of the model. This training then assists ML-based systems to pick webshells and quarantine them before they can perform harm the system.