Industry Experts Team Up to Advance Cybersecurity With AI

The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (DTI) invited scholars, researchers, and software developers to submit proposals for advancing cybersecurity with artificial intelligence (AI). The C3.ai DTI is a collaborative research consortium managed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley.

Other notable partners include Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago.

“Cybersecurity is an existential issue,” Thomas M. Siebel, chairman and CEO of C3 AI, stated in the announcement.

“We are assembling the best minds on the planet to develop innovative AI to attain a step-function improvement in securing IT, OT, and critical infrastructure systems.”

C3.ai DTI is calling for proposals and will present research awards on the following topics:

1. AI techniques to identify previously unknown malware, ransomware, and zero-day vulnerabilities, enabling isolation and neutralization
2. AI-enabled network and system crawlers that can continuously search and identify persistent access mechanisms (backdoors), bots, remote access toolkits (RATS), stagers, and Trojans
3. AI forensics and attribution techniques to identify sources of attacks
4. AI techniques to automate simulated adversarial attacks to identify system and network vulnerabilities
5. AI techniques to accurately identify and enable the neutralization of phishing attacks
6. Change management techniques to prevent the weaponization of innocent insiders
7. AI techniques to detect the presence of advanced persistent threats and insider threats
8. AI-enabled network and/or system crawlers that access and continuously evaluate system security levels
9. AI techniques, perhaps in supervised or unsupervised learning, to provide early detection of system and/or network anomalies that might be indicative of unauthorized access, denial of service, or data exfiltration
10. Techniques and methods to enable the development of AI algorithms that are resilient to adversarial attacks
11. AI techniques to identify concentration risk in the software and computer supply chain
12. Change management to transform organizational behavior to manifest best practices in cyber hygiene
13. Techniques to respond to attacks at the organizational and societal level

The deadline to submit proposals is February 7, 2022. Award winners will be announced in March 2022 and may take part in the annual C3.ai DTI Research Symposium, which will be held in March as well.

“We aim to develop AI techniques to identify and neutralize malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, and prevent the weaponization of innocent insiders,” R. Srikant, C3.ai DTI co-director, explained in the announcement.

Attacks on US critical infrastructure have increased over the past few years, indicating an urgent need to safeguard critical entities. The cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline in May 2021 led President Biden to issue an executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity.

Meanwhile, threat actors are getting bolder with their targets and attack methods. Analysis from the CyberPeace Institute found that 12 ransomware groups singled out healthcare organizations in the past 18 months despite explicitly saying that they would not target the sector.

To combat growing cyber threats, recent research from The Economist Intelligence Unit explored the promising possibilities of using artificial intelligence tools to bolster cybersecurity efforts.

“In integrating AI technologies with cybersecurity programs and systems, businesses across sectors have an invaluable opportunity to address one of the most complicated and potentially damaging risk factors organizations face today,” the report stated.

C3.ai DTI will award up to $10 million in cash awards to fund research, along with access to supercomputing, cloud computing, and AI software resources from Microsoft and C3.ai.