Preventing cyberattacks with artificial intelligence

DAUIN will coordinate the new project Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Threat Intelligence - AI4CTI, funded by the Italian Fund for Applied Sciences (FISA) of the Ministry of University and Research-MUR.
The FISA program aims to bring fundamental research closer to industrial research and experimental development, to promote the competitiveness of the national production system.

The project AI4CTI, is led by Marco Mellia, professor at the Department of Automation and Computer Science-DAUIN, and will be developed in collaboration with Ermes Cyber Security, a pioneering company in the field of digital security. The research uses Artificial Intelligence to design algorithms and systems capable of quickly preventing and identifying threats of fraud and cyberattacks, protecting users from scam attempts and their devices from abuse. The goal is to counter illegal activities that exploit social engineering techniques – that aim to obtain personal information through deception and manipulation – such as phishing or scareware. Through the creation of a scalable and intelligent data collection system, it will be possible to train AI models capable of working with textual information, images, sounds, videos, typically encountered online, to allow the identification of threats and attempts to exfiltrate confidential information. The technologies developed in AI4CTI will enable the creation of automatic attack detection systems to offer protection directly on users' devices, and at the same time feed the creation of open databases that collect and share information in other cyber defense ecosystems.