Will cyber security jobs be automated? I asked this same question with more than 500 cyber security engineers. This blog post is based on a survey and my personal thoughts.
I asked this same question with more than 500 cyber security engineers and 70% of them (including myself) said NO cyber security jobs should not be automated.
Also according to a released report from security advisors Exabeam, there’s a fear of jobs replaced by AI, among cyber security engineers under the age of 45.
First let me break down why there is no simple answer, why people have different thoughts about it.
Why will cyber security jobs be automated?
It’s not easy to say what will happen with AI in future, will AI replace cybersecurity engineers. It is hard to answer because of the evolution of AI. Maybe it will happen in future (I’m not sure).
AI will not be able to replace the cybersecurity engineers completely. AI is able to replace some of the manual tasks in Cybersecurity space. For example, In order to respond to any security alert received from the SOC team, we needed to have manual intervention where the analyst will acknowledge the customer that alert has been received and is under investigation now. Once they receive an alert they do the basic investigation like verifying the reputation of IP address, location of the incident, the severity of the incident, impact etc. I can easily say most of these actions required a level-1 skill set.
AI is already replacing some of the level-1 tasks of cyber security. This is going to help cybersecurity engineers, not to replace cybersecurity engineers totally.
Even with 88% of cybersecurity professionals stating they believe automation will make their jobs easier, security teams can be expected to be more effective with the resources that they have.
As for now, AI is only capable of doing simple tasks in cybersecurity.
Why not will cyber security jobs be automated?
Cyber security jobs do not die out, but they’re certainly going to change. We’re already seeing signs of these changes. Self-learning AI helps security teams to get ahead of the game of security.
What we’ve seen is that AI is helping security transform from a reactive discipline into one that is far more aligned, strategic, and forward looking.
Security reporting for a long time has been part of the technology or IT group, but now we’re starting to see that shift towards risk and compliance. We’re starting to see security challenges be recognized not just as a technology issue, but as a business risk, and CIOs, executive teams, and boards are thinking strategically about how business decisions will impact security.
Every technology brings new challenges and it’s going to be more difficult to maintain data securely.
Cyber security scope will become more wide to ensure that AI (Artificial intelligence) and ML (Machine learning) is not being misused.
Conclusion
As i already mentioned people have different thoughts about it. I personally think No it is not possible. Every technology brings new challenges and it’s going to be more difficult to maintain data securely.
Cyber security scope will become more wide to ensure that AI (Artificial intelligence) and ML (Machine learning) is not being misused. A new approach needs to be defined to ensure all aspects of machine learning are full proof and leave no vulnerabilities/bugs for attackers to exploit.