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Robocops can’t tackle online crime without human assistance Posted on : Nov 13 - 2017

Cybercrime is on the rise, and organizations across a wide variety of industries — from financial institutions to insurance, health care providers, and large e-retailers — are rightfully worried. In the first half of 2017 alone, over 2 billion records were compromised. After stealing PII (personally identifiable information) from these hacks, fraudsters can gain access to customer accounts, create synthetic identities, and even craft phony business profiles to commit various forms of fraud. Naturally, companies are frantically looking to beef up their security teams. But there’s a problem.

A large skills gap is causing hiring difficulties in the cybersecurity industry, so much so that the Information Systems Audit and Control Association found that less than one in four candidates who apply for cybersecurity jobs are qualified. The ISACA predicts that this lack of qualified applicants will lead to a global shortage of 2 million cybersecurity professionals by 2019.

In response, many companies are turning to artificial intelligence to pick up the slack. This raises a very important and expensive question: Are robocops ready for the job?

Training and supervision are paramount

One of AI’s apparent benefits is in providing authentication without the need for human involvement. Monitoring of implicit data points (i.e., a user’s environment, or geo-location), device characteristics (metadata of the call), biometrics (heartbeat), and behavior (typing speed and style) to validate someone’s identity can be done more effectively and faster with AI than with the human eye.

Companies are already seeing great results from AI, as illustrated by FICO’s newest Falcon consortium models, which have improved CNP fraud detection by 30 percent without increasing the false positive rate.

While AI’s ability to authenticate may outweigh that of a human, without strategic direction from a human to alleviate the cold-start problem, cybercrime is too intricate an issue to solve. Given the complexity of a cybersecurity environment and the lack of proper foundation from which to start, unsupervised cyber-sleuthing from robocops gets us nowhere. Identifying patterns in big data is an impressive feat for AI, but these analyses in themselves are ill-equipped to fight the war on fraud and eliminate inefficient CX. View More