Giulio Giaconi from BT: Using AI and Visual Analytics to Protect BT
Date:
Abstract: Cybersecurity is a fast-evolving field, in which attackers are constantly adapting their strategies to elude defenders. To counter this ever-increasing challenge, the Security Futures Practice at BT Labs researches and develops innovative methods to protect BT’s and its customers’ networks. This talk is an overview of the research carried out by the team which uses techniques from AI, big data and visual analytics to augment a cybersecurity analyst’s ability to detect and respond to threats and cyberattacks, allowing for closer interaction between humans and machines. The activity spans the entire system development life cycle, from conceiving a technique to implementing it on BT’s cybersecurity platform. We use big data tools, such as Apache Spark, to process and aggregate extensive amounts of data to extrapolate useful insights. Development of our own e.g. deep-learning-based AI techniques to detect suspicious activities automatically and at scale ranges from clustering and anomaly detection to natural language processing. Work also focuses on intuitive interactive interfaces, from dashboards and graph analytics to virtual reality, allowing analysts to easily contextualise and triage results, and feed their insights back into our algorithms for further processing.