Experts explain why AI is necessary for curbing cybercrime

Cyber security experts have explained why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a necessary tool for curbing cybercrime. The experts, who spoke at a quarterly forum hosted by the Committee of E-business Industry Heads (CeBIH) in Lagos recently added that AI is also important for strengthening cybersecurity.

The quarterly forum which had as theme, ‘ Cybercrime: Enhancing Consumer Trust and Security with Artificial Intelligence’, explored various ways businesses and organisations could tap AI to improve their cyber strength and curb cyber attacks.

Celestine Appeal, CeBIH’s chairman, explained that cyber attacks occur very fast, adding that automated means of cybersecurity works faster than manual input.

“Frauds happen in split seconds; by the time you wake up in the morning, if you are using human effort, you find out that it will be too late to detect. This is why we are considering leveraging AI to spot and stop these attacks even when people are sleeping,” Appeal said.

According to her, the quarterly event discusses and offers solutions to burning issues affecting the industry.

“Cybercrime is a burning issue and a problem that has eaten deep into the industry and affected customer trust and safety of transactions,” she added.

The chairman also urged innovators to put security at the forefront of any invention for a strong cyber network, advising that, “as we continue to innovate and bring new ideas, security should be at the top of our mind.”

Continuing, she said, “without security, consumers will not feel free to take on digitisation and that will take us far back to where we are coming from which is cash society. Let us build in processes and infrastructure that will curb fraud.”

The industry experts also noted that AI could also serve as a tool to identify scam and security threat, identity trends and patterns, detect unusual behaviour and analyse communication which are necessary tools to curb and manage fraud.

Amit Mehta, vice president, Cybersecurity Consulting Practice Lead at Mastercard, explained the importance of AI in enhancing consumer trust, especially in the world of digital banking.

According to Mehta, “there is no doubt that new technologies are fast evolving. What we should be most bothered about is not the technology itself, but their essence in consumer experience.

AI is one of such innovations that digital banking cannot play down because of the disruption it has and will continue to bring into the financial services ecosystem.

“Key issues that digital banking must have been grappling with can be resolved by AI. A typical example is the ability to generate automated responses for customer experience. However, there is a need for the assessment of the deployment of AI,” he said.