AI speeds up analysis work for humans, two federal cyber officials say

More broadly, AI is viewed as being a double-edged sword in cybersecurity, one that can bolster both defensive and offensive operations.

Two federal cybersecurity officials said Thursday that they’re using — or contemplating using — artificial intelligence to conduct tasks that speed up the work of human analysts.

AI is an important current and future contributor to a variety of security-related administrative jobs like accreditation and compliance, and for the Department of the Air Force as it undertakes modernization efforts, said Lt. Col. Frank Jamerson, the department’s deputy director for cyber operations, command and control, communications and battle management.

“The compliance analyst doesn’t necessarily have to read every document,” Jamerson said Thursday at the AITalks conference, presented by AIScoop. “They can look at the output from the tool that says, ‘Yep, they’re in compliance because they did this thing’ and click bullet formats — we all love doing that — and bulletize this. So that’s one of the exciting things we’re looking at.”

At the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, there’s a lot of “data we are digesting,” said Manny Medrano, director of cyber monitoring and operations at the bureau. AI allows analysts to analyze it faster, and in turn “gives the analyst time to work on the more complicated” tasks, he said.

More broadly, AI is viewed as being a double-edged sword in cybersecurity, one that can bolster both defensive and offensive operations. Cyber Command recently touted how generative AI is speeding up analysis of network traffic for malicious activity.

“Anyone that works in cybersecurity, if you’re working on the manual side, a lot of times will say, ‘hey, it’ll take hours, days, weeks to be able to analyze specific traffic, specific lines of code,’” Cybercom Executive Director Morgan Adamski said. “We have now been able to leverage AI to be able to get through that in minutes and hours.” 

FedScoop reporter Madison Alder contributed to this article.

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