Microsoft (MSFT) is bringing OpenAI’s ChatGPT capabilities to its cybersecurity business via its new Microsoft Security Copilot. The software, which was announced Tuesday, is meant to help cybersecurity professionals prevent and detect cyberattacks faster and with greater ease.
“The entire impact of this is to defend the way we've never been able to defend before,” Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft CVP of security, compliance, identity, and management told Yahoo Finance. “You're now going to be able to protect and disrupt attacks when they're happening.”
Security Copilot, Jakkal explained, runs on both OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI model and Microsoft’s own security-specific model. The result is an AI bot that allows cybersecurity professionals to do things like quickly pull together information on the latest security incidents in their companies, dig into potential threats, and even quickly look up data on common vulnerabilities and exposures.
In one example, Microsoft showed how Security Copilot can look at a cyberattack to pick apart how the hacker got into a network and onto a victim’s device.
“It’s the first and only generative AI-based, [large language model]-based tool that is out there. It’s one of a kind. This has never happened before,” Jakkal added.
Microsoft says that Security Copilot will allow cybersecurity workers to catch incidents that other approaches may otherwise miss, improve the quality of threat detection, speed up their response, and help them improve their overall security standing.
Microsoft already sells an array of cybersecurity offerings including Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Sentinel. In January, the company announced that its cybersecurity arm is now a $20 billion a year business.
The tech giant says that Security Copilot will continually improve as it learns from a company’s own data. That data, however, will never be used to teach the broader Copilot algorithm. Meaning a customer’s information will remain its own.
Security Copilot works just like Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Cybersecurity workers type a prompt into a text box, and Security Copilot will fire back a reply based on the app’s available knowledge set.
As with the company’s other generative AI offerings, Microsoft says Security Copilot may provide incorrect answers to prompts, and gives users a means to report them.
The announcement comes just weeks after Microsoft debuted its Microsoft 365 Copilot for its Microsoft 365 productivity suite. That offering allows users to take advantage of Microsoft’ and OpenAI’s AI capabilities to do things like put together a PowerPoint presentation, write up articles in Word, and more.
Microsoft is riding high on its multi-billion investment in OpenAI. The firm, which originally showed off its ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, is pouring the technology into seemingly all of its products as the AI wars heat up across Silicon Valley.
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