Highlights:

  • The Cisco AI Assistant for Security is trained on one of the world’s largest security-focused datasets, which analyzes over 550 billion security events daily.
  • The AI Assistant aids customers in making well-informed decisions, enhancing their tool capabilities, and automating intricate tasks.

Recently, Cisco Systems Inc. released a new AI assistant that offers automated task management, advanced data analysis, and policy recommendations to improve cybersecurity measures.

Termed the Cisco AI Assistant for Security, this innovative service is a key milestone in integrating AI into the Security Cloud, Cisco’s unified security platform. The AI Assistant aids customers in making informed decisions, amplifying tool capabilities, and automating intricate tasks.

Crafted to tackle the escalating challenge posed by rising cyberattacks, the new service caters to the growing demand for heightened cybersecurity within organizations. Ransomware attacks have been a consistent problem for Cisco, accounting for 20% of Cisco Talos Incident Response engagements this year. In addition, the business has seen a rise in sophisticated attacks on networking devices in the previous year, especially from state-sponsored entities, necessitating the implementation of machine-scale defenses.

The AI Assistant for Security has been trained on one of the world’s largest security-focused data sets, which analyzes over 550 billion security events daily from the web, email, endpoints, networks, and applications. The assistant can comprehend event triage, impact and scope, root cause analysis and policy design to close the gap between cybersecurity intent and outcomes.

At the recent Cisco Live Conference in Melbourne, Australia, additional new products—including firewall tools—were announced. The AI Assistant for Firewall Policy and an AI-powered Encrypted Visibility Engine for All Firewall Models are among the tools that were released alongside the Cisco AI Assistant for Security.

AI Assistant for Firewall Policy aims to make managing and maintaining firewall rules and policies easier. It enables administrators to communicate with the system in natural language to find policies and get suggestions for new rules.

Examining encrypted traffic is a challenge addressed by the new Encrypted Visibility Engine for All Firewall Models. The feature, compatible with all Cisco Secure Firewall models and a part of the 7.4.1 operating system from Cisco, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify potentially malicious data in encrypted traffic without decrypting it. It accomplishes this by analyzing billions of samples—including malware samples that have been sandboxed—to determine whether encrypted traffic carries malware.

Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco, Jeetu Patel, said ahead of the release, “To be an AI-first company, you must be a data-first company. With our extensive native telemetry, Cisco is uniquely positioned to deliver cybersecurity solutions that allow businesses to confidently operate at machine scale, augmenting what humans can do alone.”