Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity: Applications and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

E-commerce and e-business, in general, are vital for the digital transformation of the industry, businesses, and the digital economy as a whole. Their success depends on security on multiple levels: technical infrastructure, communications, data, and operations. Penetration of infrastructure, eavesdropping along communication channels, unauthorised access to data, stealing and leaking information, fraudulent transactions, malicious interventions and cyberattacks are some of the typical cases of malicious behaviour, which require protective measures, strong defences, and timely mitigation.

The AI revolution we are witnessing is a key to achieving this, both at the design stage and in real time.  Many recent developments within AI have direct application to cybersecurity and security of operation in general—non-deterministic modelling using Bayesian and Markov approaches for data integration and automation of business processes, statistical data analysis and machine learning for detection of adversaries and attacks, synthetic data generation and reinforcement learning for parametric tuning and adaptive optimisation of the control mechanisms, generative AI and agentic technologies for expert assessment and improving the overall quality of services, etc.

Both big cybersecurity companies, such as CISCO, Palo Alto, Juniper, etc., as well as powerful cloud service providers, like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, are offering both hardware and software services to address the cybersecurity problems. Still, the complexity of cyberspace requires continuous research, innovation and experimentation to achieve ultimate security on all levels. This Special Issue addresses many of them, providing a public forum to both researchers and professionals in the fields.

Prof. Dr. Vassil Vassilev
Prof. Dr. Karim Ouazzane
Dr. Maitreyee Dey
Guest Editors

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