Some 20 years earlier, internet was slow, expensive and not much affordable. But today, the whole world had shrinked to a tap on smartphone. Internet has achieved a massive accessibility in almost every part of the world. With internet, we have become more vulnerable to cyber attacks like data theft, ransomware attacks,  banking frauds, etc. But as technology is advancing too at a great pace, there comes machine learning to rescue!




As all of you know that machine learning is used to train machines & softwares to perform a specific task without any instructions and with the help of stored data. So, you may be thinking now how can machine learning be helpful against cyber attacks. Here are some of the ways-




> It can label a particular data as malware, commonly after checking all files ending with ".Exe" and try to match it with the data of known malicious code; if found similar, it will eliminate it from the system. Basically that's one of the way how antivirus works!




> Machine learning will be a great thing to empower large networks of corporates, hospitals, law firms, etc. against cyber attack. Whenever network is attacked by some kind of malware; system will store its data & if similar kind of attack will happen in future- the network can block it itself, no need to call ethical hackers. Its working is similar to our immune system against microbes.





> Predictive analysis is the most common feature of machine learning. We can use data mining to predict unknown coding to be malicious or not. It will be very useful to protect small gadgets and smartphones against stealth viruses, which appears to be important as some software updates or plug-in; so they go undetected by common anti-virus softwares.




> Machine Learning will be the most effective weapon against ransomware attacks ( malware that locks all files and data of a device & ask for payment to unlock it ). When ransomware attack happens, new code would be injected into the system, which can easily be detected by machine learning powered anti-virus software before the full attack happen.





Yes, I agree that machine learning will not be 100% successful against cyber attacks. We will still need cyber experts to prevent it, but machine learning will definitely add an extra layer of security for our devices and networks and will reduce our vulnerability!