AI and Cyber Security: Your Guide to the Future of Threat Management and Data Governance
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming cyber security, offering new, much more efficient solutions, to detect and mitigate cyber threats more efficiently than ever before.
However, cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with AI emerging as a tool for cybercriminals. This actually makes it a crucial tool for IT Directors, CISOs, and security professionals looking to stay ahead of these increasingly sophisticated attacks.
AI presents new risks and benefits. The same technology that strengthens defences can be exploited by cybercriminals to automate attacks, create deepfake scams, and bypass traditional security measures. On top of that, AI’s integration into our day to day lives – both in and out of work – brings compliance challenges with data governance, requiring organisations to ensure secure AI usage.
Analyst firm Gartner lists AI as the number 1 leading cyber security trend. In the UK, over half of businesses now use AI to bolster cyber security and fraud prevention measures, as these tools can analyse patterns and spot potential threats more efficiently than traditional methods. 70% of cyber security professionals report that AI is highly effective at detecting threats that previously went unnoticed – a game changer for protecting your business.
This article will explore AI’s role in cyber security, real-world applications of AI in cyber security, emerging threats, and the challenges and importance of AI in data governance. It also examines future trends and how you can prepare your business for AI-driven cyber threats, while also maintaining compliance and data integrity.
Key Takeaways
- AI is revolutionising cyber security by enabling faster, more accurate threat detection, automating responses, and reducing analyst workload.
- Cybercriminals are using AI too, creating deepfake scams, AI-powered phishing, and adaptive malware that bypass traditional defences.
- AI-driven SOC services offer 24/7 protection, filtering false positives, predicting attacks, and identifying threats before escalation.
- AI also enhances data governance, automating compliance checks, data classification, and anomaly detection for more efficient, real-time data control.
- New risks like prompt injection and AI misuse require strong governance — businesses must implement strict policies, employee training, and AI-specific oversight to remain compliant and secure.
- Balancing innovation with risk management is essential — combining human expertise with AI tools helps you stay ahead of threats while protecting your data and reputation.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Cyber security
Successful adoption requires understanding both the benefits and risks of AI in cyber security.
How AI is Being Used in Modern Cyber Security
Looking at this from a positive perspective, AI is revolutionising the capabilities of cyber protection – with threat detection, incident response and security automation all seeing major enhancements from this new technology.
Traditional solutions use a rule-based system to detect and respond to attacks. However, modern AI-based solutions can now use AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms, to analyse huge datasets and behaviour patterns, that humans couldn’t even attempt to understand in real time.
We’ll dive into the real-world applications and benefits of AI in cyber security later in the blog, but a few key AI in cyber security use cases include:
- Automated threat detection – AI can rapidly analyse network traffic, identifying potential threats and malicious activity before they can escalate
- Deep behavioural analytics – AI can monitor user behaviour on a granular level to detect unusual patterns, such as repeated unauthorised access attempts or privilege escalation, in real time
- Malware identification – AI-powered tooling now has the ability to recognise new and adaptive strains of malware by analysing code similarities and execution behaviour
Key Benefits of AI-Powered Security Solutions
As mentioned, AI-powered cyber security solutions provide several advantages for cyber protection. In this new world of AI-powered threats, security solutions must be able to match this speed in detection and mitigation, or risk falling behind.
Advantages of AI-powered solutions include:
- Faster threat detection and response – New AI-powered tooling can detect and mitigate cyber threats in real time, significantly reducing response times, which is key in preventing a successful breach
- Improved accuracy – AI reduces the number of false positives that security analysts must deal with, by differentiating between legitimate and malicious activities faster and more effectively than traditional security tools
- Time efficiency – AI can automate repetitive security tasks, allowing your cyber security and IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives
- Scalability – AI-based security solutions can handle vast amounts of data, and respond faster than a human can, making them ideal if you have a complex IT infrastructure
Real-World Applications of AI in Cyber Security
AI for Threat Detection and Response
One of the most significant benefits of AI in cyber security is in the area of threat detection and response. AI-driven Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems can analyse network logs in real time – or more accurately at computer speed – flagging any anomalies as potential breaches.
Given the sudden increase in adaptive malware attacks on businesses across the globe, it’s imperative that you deploy AI-powered solutions to protect your business. Studies show that AI-based security solutions can detect certain attacks five times faster than traditional tools. In practical terms, this means an AI-enhanced Security Operations Centre (SOC) can identify and respond to intrusions before they escalate.
AI can also automate incident response based on triggers governed by your Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) capabilities. AI-powered SOAR can isolate compromised systems and neutralise threats before human intervention is even required. This gives your security team the ability to spend more time researching for emerging threats to stay ahead of emerging attack vectors.
AI in Phishing Prevention and Fraud Detection
Phishing attacks still remain as the biggest cyber threat that businesses face. With new AI capabilities, you can identify phishing attempts faster.
By analysing email content, sender behaviour, and URL authenticity, AI-based security tools can protect you from this ever-present threat. AI-based fraud detection systems can also monitor transactions for suspicious activity, which reduces your risk of falling victim to financial fraud.
AI-Driven Security Operations Centre (SOC) Services
A managed SOC service provides you with 24/7/365 cyber protection for your entire business infrastructure. SOCs are already a very powerful tool in detecting and mitigating against cyber breaches and offering you complete protection against attacks.
In the new era of AI, a next-generation managed SOC service offer you even further enhanced security monitoring and response capabilities. AI in SOC can now uncover the most sophisticated of threats and respond decisively. With tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, businesses can now get the most advanced threat detection, event management and response services to ensure security postures remain resilient against cyber threats.
Alert fatigue is a well-documented issue for security analysts. With AI-powered advanced security tooling at their fingertips, your SOC analysts can identify the positive alerts they need to address amongst otherwise unmanageable noise and reduce their alert fatigue.
AI-driven SOC services have the capability to:
- Prioritise security alerts – AI filters out false positives, ensuring analysts focus on genuine threats.
- Automate threat intelligence gathering – AI collects and analyses threat intelligence from multiple sources across the internet to improve response strategies
- Predict cyberattacks – AI can identify the behaviour patterns that indicate an impending cyberattack, allowing proactive mitigation
- Detect unusual behaviour – AI shines in user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA). By learning the normal behaviour of your users, devices, and applications, AI can detect unusual activities that often signal potential cyberattacks
Challenges and Risks of AI in Cyber Security
Unfortunately, as with everything in cyber security, the tools that you can use to protect your business are also being utilised for malicious activity by cybercriminals. AI is also lowering the barrier to entry for low level cybercriminals, enabling them to execute highly automated, scalable, and adaptive attacks, without extensive technical knowledge.
From AI-generated phishing emails to deepfake videos, threat actors are exploiting this new technology to create more convincing attacks. The “AI vs AI” fight raises the stakes for your IT and security teams. It reinforces the need for you to adopt AI-driven defences – just to keep pace with AI-enhanced threats. A balanced approach of human expertise and AI tooling can give you a competitive edge.
AI-Powered Cyberattacks: How Cybercriminals Use AI
AI-powered tools can also automate cyberattacks, making them faster, more scalable, and harder to detect. This is a significant challenge for your business if you don’t have the capability to match this escalating threat with AI-based monitoring, detection and response capabilities.
AI-powered Phishing Attacks
One notable example is WormGPT, an AI-powered tool designed specifically for cybercriminals.
WormGPT, and a similar counterpart called FraudGPT, have been used to craft sophisticated phishing emails that bypass traditional detection mechanisms. Unlike traditional phishing attacks that rely on poor grammar or badly written messages, AI-generated phishing attempts can better mimic human writing styles by using natural language capabilities, which is what makes them far more convincing and harder to detect.
AI-powered Malware Attacks
IBM researchers developed a proof of concept malware that demonstrated just how effectively these tools can conceal their attack. The malware, called DeepLocker, used AI to hide its malicious payload, deploying it only when the malware detected the intended target.
As cybercriminals leverage AI to create more sophisticated and adaptive malware strains, you must strengthen your defences with AI-powered security solutions.
AI-Generated Deepfake Scams
Deepfake technology uses AI capabilities to create highly realistic audio and video footage to manipulate employees as part of social engineering attacks.
Cybercriminals have already used deepfakes for identity fraud, misinformation campaigns, and AI-generated phishing scams. These deepfakes make it extremely difficult to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent communications.
Cyber security researchers have detected a surge in AI-generated video scams over the last year, where criminals used deepfake avatars to pose as company executives in virtual meetings. This technique has been used to gain trust, manipulate employees into divulging sensitive data, and authorise fraudulent transactions
A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into transferring $25 million after a video call with a deepfake impersonation of the company’s CFO convinced them to make the transaction. Cybercriminals used AI-generated video and voice synthesis to mimic the CFO’s appearance and speech, making the fraud almost impossible to detect for the unsuspecting employee.
Regular training for your workforce is the best defence in to combat the threat of AI in cyber security. By educating them on these new sophisticated attacks, they can act as the first line of defence for your business, with your managed SOC service in place to combat human error and other attempted breaches.
AI in Data Governance
Beyond threat detection and attack mitigation, AI is also reshaping how organisations govern and protect their data – an often overlooked, but very critical aspect of cyber security.
Data governance encompasses the policies and processes for managing data availability, usability, integrity, and security. With stringent data protection regulations, such as GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act, and data volumes increasing, maintaining good governance is a major challenge.
AI has stepped in automating a lot of data governance tasks that were once laborious, helping IT Directors and CISOs to ensure that their sensitive information is properly controlled and compliant.
The role of AI in automating data governance has expanded rapidly in recent years. Advanced AI and machine learning tools can take on tasks such as data classification, monitoring data usage, enforcing retention policies, and detecting anomalies in how data is accessed or shared. By doing this, AI can reduce the manual workload on your data protection officer or teams.
AI-driven governance systems continuously scan databases and file repositories to flag files that contain personal or confidential information, apply the correct sensitivity labels, and can even restrict access automatically based on the organisation’s policy.
Benefits of AI in Data Governance
AI brings several benefits to data governance processes:
- Real-time Anomaly Detection: AI systems monitor data activities 24/7 and can instantly detect unusual patterns or suspicious behaviour
For instance, if an employee account suddenly accesses a large set of sensitive records, AI will flag it as an anomaly for investigation. By leveraging advanced algorithms, you can detect unusual data behaviour much faster and even automatically block unauthorised access requests or suspicious activity before it can execute.
- Automated Compliance Checks: Keeping up with evolving data protection regulations and internal policies is daunting. AI simplifies this task by automating compliance monitoring
AI-driven tools can track how and where data is stored or transferred and compare these activities against compliance requirements, for example, ensuring that customer data isn’t kept beyond its retention period and is properly anonymised. Modern platforms use AI to offer predictive compliance monitoring, staying abreast of regulatory changes and even predicting potential compliance issues before they become violations. This proactive approach can help you to avoid fines and penalties, by catching policy breaches early and ensuring continuous compliance with frameworks such as ISO 27001, DORA and NIS2.
- Intelligent Data Classification: Classifying data, by marking which data is sensitive, confidential or public, is fundamental to data governance
AI significantly accelerates this process. Machine learning models can analyse documents, emails, and databases to categorise information based on its content and, without the need for hours of human effort from your teams.
Tools like Microsoft Purview use AI to scan and tag data assets, company wide. The result is better visibility into where sensitive data resides and who has access to it, which in turn supports more effective security controls and access governance.
- Enhanced Data Privacy Management: AI-driven privacy management tools can automatically identify personal data within large datasets and apply techniques like encryption, masking, or anonymisation
This ensures that data privacy laws are implemented without relying on human audits. For example, algorithms can detect strings of digits that look like national insurance numbers or find text snippets that appear to be personal addresses, then mask or tokenise them. By using AI in data governance, you can track and safeguard your sensitive information, provide real time monitoring to ensure compliance with anonymisation, and manage data minimisation rules.
Risks Introduced by AI in Data Governance
While AI can enhance your data governance, it can also introduce new risks that you need to manage closely. Implementing AI systems – if not governed properly – can become sources of security and compliance issues themselves.
- Prompt injection attacks: Prompt injection is a relatively new attack vector specific to AI models, especially those that use natural language prompts (like chatbots or generative AI assistants). It’s a bit like an injection flaw in traditional software, as it can manipulate AI outputs or behaviour if safeguards are not in place
In a prompt injection attack, an attacker manipulates the input given to an AI system – for example, crafting a malicious prompt for a chatbot – to trick it into an unintended action or disclosure. This is problematic for data governance, where an AI assistant could be coaxed into revealing sensitive information, or bypassing access controls via cleverly crafted queries. If you’re using AI for data classification or answering data queries, you must ensure that these systems are hardened against such manipulation, for example by implementing strict input validation and context awareness to neutralise malicious prompts.
- Unintentional exposure of sensitive data: AI systems use huge data ingestion to answer prompts. They train on very large datasets (including the internet) and often interact with live data
If not carefully controlled, the use of AI systems might lead your employees to ingest or output confidential information. There have been incidents where employees unwittingly leaked company secrets by using public AI services. In one high-profile case, engineers at Samsung inadvertently shared sensitive company data with an AI chatbot, thinking they were just getting coding help.
Many AI models (especially cloud-based ones) retain input data to improve their learning; thus, sensitive data might persist outside of the organisation’s control. To mitigate this, you must introduce strict policies on AI usage – for instance, banning the entry of company data into public chatbots – and opt for privacy protective AI options such as ChatGPT’s Temporary chat function.
The Importance of AI Governance and Regulatory Oversight
In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has published guidance on AI and data protection, making it clear that existing data laws do apply to AI systems and highlighting best practices for compliance and fairness.
The European Union’s upcoming AI Act will impose stringent requirements on AI applications considered ‘high-risk’, which could include certain security and governance tools. Businesses will likely be required to conduct AI risk assessments, ensure human oversight, and maintain audit trails of AI system decisions.
Given the risks introduced by AI in data governance outlined above, you must extend your governance policies to cover AI itself. By building a framework of policies, controls, and oversight that directs the ethical and effective use of AI, you can establish clear rules around how AI models are used in prompts, what data they can access, how their decisions are validated, and how their outputs are used in your organisation. Effective AI governance ensures that AI usage aligns with your organisation’s security policies.
The Future of AI in Cyber Security
AI is a powerful tool in the fight against new and more sophisticated cyber threats and in managing data responsibly.
It can identify threats faster, manage complex data environments, and automate routine security tasks. For UK organisations facing resource constraints and an aggressive threat landscape, the benefits of AI in cyber security, from real-time attack neutralisation to streamlined compliance, are highly attractive. With AI, your security teams – whether in-house or outsourced to an expert cyber security service provider – can be more proactive and less reactive, when protecting your business.
From what we can see right now, the future of AI in cyber security will see an increased adoption of:
- Autonomous cyber security systems – AI-driven security tools that operate with minimal human intervention
- Explainable AI (XAI) – AI models that provide transparent decision making processes
- AI-powered zero trust security – AI will enhance zero trust framework adoption by continuously verifying user identities
How Businesses Should Prepare for AI-Driven Cyber Threats
As we’ve discussed throughout this article, embracing AI means leveraging AI’s strengths and its challenges, while also putting guardrails around its use to protect your data and reputation.
To strike this balance, you must combine the technology enhancements AI brings to your business and security measures, with strict policies to govern usage. It’s essential to deploy AI solutions in areas like threat detection, incident response, and data governance where they can clearly add value. Implement strong AI governance, conduct regular reviews and monitoring of AI outputs, and ensure your compliance teams are involved when AI touches regulated data.
To stay ahead of AI-driven cyber threats, you need to be looking at:
- Investing in AI-driven security solutions: – You can leverage AI-powered threat detection and incident response tooling or work with a managed SOC service provider to take advantage of their specialist expertise, without the overhead costs
- Develop AI literacy – Train your teams, particularly in IT and Compliance, on AI’s capabilities, risks, and the best practices for usage
- Adopt a proactive cyber security strategy – You must be continuously updating your security measures, including AI models, to counter evolving threats to your business. A managed SOC service will provide a proactive service based on the most advanced tools available
Cyber security professionals should also foster a culture of continuous improvement and education around AI. This means keeping up with the latest threat intelligence on how attackers might trick or evade AI systems, and updating defences continuously.
You must also educate your employees across the organisation about the safe use of AI, in the same way you would run awareness campaigns for phishing. When everyone understands both the potential and the risks of AI, your organisation as a whole will be able to innovate confidently rather than fearfully.
Conclusion: AI and Cyber Security Acting Together
AI and cyber security working together presents a huge opportunity to elevate your defensive capabilities and manage your data and compliance in more efficient ways.
As AI becomes woven into your cyber security strategies, your IT Directors or CISO must ensure they’re not only leveraging its power but also controlling its impact.
By automating tedious and large volume tasks, and augmenting complex security mitigations, AI can free up your human experts to focus on strategy and creative problem-solving. By extending your use of this new innovation to governance, you can prevent AI from becoming a threat to your operations and data.
The future of AI and cyber security looks likely to be a partnership of human creativity and artificial intelligence. This partnership can create security practices that are more robust, compliant, and resilient than ever before.
Embracing AI in cyber security, with strong data governance and ethical guardrails, will allow you to confidently navigate the evolving threat landscape while safeguarding the trust of your customers and stakeholders.
If you’d like to explore the adoption of AI in cyber security for your business, get in touch with our security and compliance experts, or call 0800 090 3734. The DigitalXRAID team will be happy to guide you on the right solution roadmap for your business.
