Cyber attacks are the No. 1 worry for business leaders—and AI may be able to help

“It’s important for companies to look for these next-generation technologies to identify and prevent attacks using things like AI,” George Kurtz, CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, told Fortune.  

The number of cyber attacks in the U.S. hit an all-time-high in 2023 with more than 3,200 breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that educates the public about cyber crime. These breaches threaten businesses because they can shut down sales, destroy reputations, create legal headaches, and put individual customers in danger. 

CrowdStrike monitors companies’ systems for hackings and blocks cyber attacks based on what it calls “Indicators of Attack,” or IOAs. These IOAs are sequences of events in a computer system that signal a breach might be taking place. For example, a signal may include a user downloading an online file and opening it, and then the file uploading code, erasing other computer files, and deleting their backups. Each of these actions alone might indicate normal computer use but together suggest something nefarious. 

“There are only so many ways to rob a bank,” Kurtz said, comparing the methodology of hacking to another kind of crime. “You have to get in and get out. It doesn’t matter what shirt you’re wearing, or whether you have a gun or a knife.” 

Similarly, there are only so many ways to commit a cyber attack, and CrowdStrike dreams up new scenarios through IOAs and tries to stop them. Previously, CrowdStrike researchers and analysts would create these IOAs by hand, said chief technology officer Elia Zaitsev. They collected patterns of behaviors on customers’ computer systems, read about new kinds of hacks, and came up with…