Beyond the buzz: Understanding AI and its role in cybersecurity

This article summarizes ESET’s white paper on AI in cybersecurity, outlining how defenders use AI for threat intelligence summarization, SOC alert prioritization, improved detections across cloud and endpoints, and configuration assistance, while adversaries exploit generative AI for scalable phishing, BEC with deepfakes, and disinformation. It highlights drivers such as skills shortages, increasingly capable threat actors, and heightened business risk, and stresses AI’s current limitations (false positives, data quality needs, human oversight), concluding that AI is accelerating an arms race rather than providing a silver bullet for either side.