Cisco Systems today announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence assistant designed to enhance cybersecurity measures by providing advanced data analysis, policy recommendations and automated task management. The new service, called Cisco AI Assistant for Security, marks an important step in Cisco's efforts to popularize artificial intelligence in its unified security platform, Security Cloud.
AI assistants can help customers make informed decisions, enhance their tool capabilities, and automate complex tasks.
The new service is designed to address the growing need for businesses to strengthen their cybersecurity as a result of an increase in cyberattacks. Cisco found that ransomware attacks continue at a steady rate, accounting for 20% of Cisco's Talos incident response business this year. Cisco also noted an increase in sophisticated attacks against network devices last year, particularly those by state-sponsored actors, which requires machine-level defenses.
AI Assistant for Security is trained on what is billed as the world's largest security data set, which analyzes more than 550 billion security events every day across networks, emails, endpoints, networks and applications. The assistant provides insights into incident triage, impact and scope, root cause analysis and policy design, aiming to close the gap between cybersecurity intent and outcomes.
Other new products were announced today at the Cisco Live Conference in Melbourne, Australia, including firewall tools. Tools announced alongside Cisco AI Assistant for Security include AI Assistant for Firewall Policy and AI-powered Encrypted Visibility Engine for all firewall models.
Firewall Policy AI Assistant is designed to simplify the management and maintenance of firewall policies and rules. It allows administrators to interact with the system using natural language to discover policies and get rule recommendations.
A new encryption visibility engine available for all firewall models solves the challenge of inspecting encrypted traffic. The feature, part of Cisco Operating System Release 7.4.1 and available on all Cisco Secure Firewall models, uses artificial intelligence to detect potential malware in encrypted traffic without decryption. It works by using billions of samples, including sandboxed malware samples, to determine whether encrypted traffic is transporting malware.
Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco, said before the launch: "To be an AI-first company, you must be a data-first company. With our broad range of native telemetry, Cisco is uniquely positioned to deliver cybersecurity solutions that enable enterprises to confidently operate at machine scale and augment human capabilities."