Doing More with Less: Detecting Malicious Activity through Responsible and Privacy-Preserving AI
Channel: FIRST
Date: 2021-02-12

Defenders and security vendors have turned to AI to scale defenses and identify targeted attacks. AI at this scale requires data, lots and lots of it. Any AI practitioner will tell you that the more data you feed the system, the better it will perform, especially when it comes to deep learning approaches. As defenders, we strive to collect the best information to train our AI to help the people that matter. Does it come at the cost of privacy? What do you do when these two things are at odds? Do you sacrifice data collection and privacy knowing detection and protection will suffer? Do you fight for the data you know you need, but risk a backlash on privacy and trust? At Microsoft, we have an internal saying, "Microsoft runs on trust". We have to be trusted by our customers, by our partners, and by the governments and the institutions that we work with globally. Yes still, we are enlisted to keep them safe - over a billion of them! In this session, we will discuss the challenges we face, the lessons we've learned, and the techniques of today and the future that can deliver on both promises: privacy AND security.
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Anna Bertiger is a Senior Data and Applied Scientist at Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection. She focuses on lateral movement detection for the EDR product and also works on cross product responsible AI efforts. Before becoming a data scientist, Anna was an academic mathematician, receiving a PhD in mathematics from Cornell University in 2013 and holding a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.

Holly has been in the security industry since 1997. She’s held roles in many types of disciplines, such as product and program management, incident response, communications, and data science. She started working for Microsoft in 2010. Currently, she is a Principal Research Manager for the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection team. Her team of researchers and data scientists use machine learning, automation, and other next generation capabilities to protect people from malware.

Sharada is a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft Information Protection team. The focus of her work is building solutions that facilitates Microsoft customers with their Compliance requirements such as GDPR, HIPPA which gives her an opportunity to wear the customer hat and make privacy and compliance practically possible at scale. Before joining Microsoft in 2015, she was a graduate student at Columbia University, New York studying Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.