#ai-in-cybersecurity

#ai-in-cybersecurity

The AI-centric security product demo looked impressive. The vendor spoke confidently about autonomous detection, self-learning defences, and AI-driven remediation. Charts moved in real time, alerts resolved themselves, and threats seemed to vanish before human analysts even noticed them.

Whenever the conversation turns to AI's role in cybersecurity, one question inevitably surfaces - sometimes bluntly, sometimes between the lines: "If AI can spot patterns faster than I can, will it still need me?" It's a fair question - and one that reflects a deeper anxiety about the future of security careers. AI is everywhere now: embedded in email gateways, SOC workflows, identity systems, and cloud defenses. But here's the truth: AI isn't erasing security roles. It's reshaping them.

Even incidents like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, which showed us how the cyber world and our physical lives intersect, stopped far short of societal disruption. However, the threat of cyberwar has been building, influenced by advancements in AI and increased presence of actors in U.S. systems and telecommunication networks. A military conflict could escalate these attacks to scale, crippling critical infrastructure and public safety systems like power grids, transportation networks and emergency response, even disrupting military communications and undermining response.

Most people know the story of Paul Bunyan. A giant lumberjack, a trusted axe, and a challenge from a machine that promised to outpace him. Paul doubled down on his old way of working, swung harder, and still lost by a quarter inch. His mistake was not losing the contest. His mistake was assuming that effort alone could outmatch a new kind of tool.

OPSWAT has released the State of File Security Report 2025, a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute to assess the file security landscape. The report discovered that 61% of organizations faced insider file breaches in the last two years, with each incident costing an average of $2.7 million. Furthermore, in the past two years, 40% of organizations experienced a cybersecurity incident costing over $1 million.

Every day, SOC analysts are expected to solve high-consequence problems with half the data and twice the pressure, leading to overwhelming burnout.

"It's not that we don't want to use AI - we just don't trust it to work reliably without us watching it," said one security analyst.