IBM Security today announced Watson for Cyber Security, a new cloud-based version of the company's cognitive technology trained in the language of security, as part of a year-long research project.

To further scale the system, IBM plans to collaborate with eight universities to greatly expand the collection of security data IBM has trained the cognitive system with.

Training Watson for Cyber Security is a critical step in the advancement of cognitive security. Watson is learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber-attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed, said a press release.

Starting this autumn, IBM will work with leading universities and their students to further train Watson in the language of cybersecurity, including: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo.

Today's news is part of a pioneering cognitive security project to address the looming cybersecurity skills gap. IBM efforts are designed to improve security analysts’ capabilities using cognitive systems that automate the connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies. IBM intends to begin beta production deployments that take advantage of IBM Watson for Cyber Security later this year, the press release added.

IBM’s X-Force research library will be a central part of the materials fed to Watson for Cyber Security. This body of knowledge includes 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and over 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.

The volume of security data presented to analysts is staggering. The average organization sees over 200,000 pieces of security event data per day with enterprises spending $1.3 million a year dealing with false positives alone, wasting nearly 21,000 hours. Couple this with 75,000-plus known software vulnerabilities reported in the National Vulnerability Database , 10,000 security research papers published each year and over 60,000 security blogs published each month – and security analysts are severely challenged to move with informed speed.

Designed on the IBM Cloud, Watson for Cyber Security will be the first technology to offer cognition of security data at scale using Watson's ability to reason and learn from "unstructured data" – 80 percent of all data on the internet that traditional security tools cannot process, including blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts, and other information.

In fact, IBM analysis found that the average organization leverages only eight per cent of this unstructured data. Watson for Cyber Security also uses natural language processing to understand the vague and imprecise nature of human language in unstructured data.

As a result, Watson for Cyber Security is designed to provide insights into emerging threats, as well as recommendations on how to stop them, increasing the speed and capabilities of security professionals. IBM will also incorporate other Watson capabilities including the system’s data mining techniques for outlier detection, graphical presentation tools and techniques for finding connections between related data points in different documents. For example, Watson can find data on an emerging form of malware in an online security bulletin and data from a security analyst's blog on an emerging remediation strategy.  

“Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager, IBM Security.

“The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime. 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 cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training," he added. –TradeArabia News Service