Microsoft Announces Competition for Developing AI-based Malware Solutions

• Microsoft listed a new competition on Kaggle that can help company tackle cyber-infections.
• The company is targeting the data science community to generate new ideas to develop new techniques to combat malware.
• The total prize pool of the competition is $25,000.

If you are interested in data science and cybersecurity and have ideas on how to tackle malware before it does any damage to computers, Microsoft may have a massive reward for you. The tech giant listed a competition on Kaggle to generate ideas that may help create new ways of combating malware through AI-based solutions.

The official announcement from Microsoft reads “As one part of their overall strategy for doing so, Microsoft is challenging the data science community to develop techniques to predict if a machine will soon be hit with malware. As with their previous, Malware Challenge (2015), Microsoft is providing Kagglers with an unprecedented malware dataset to encourage open-source progress on effective techniques for predicting malware occurrences.”

The winner of the competition will take home $12,000 with the runner-up set to receive $7,000. The competition will be based on a dataset provided by Microsoft that consists of 9.4GB of unprecedented malware from approximately 16.8 million infected systems. The Kaggler who is able to get maximum accuracy out of an AI-based solution will be declared the winner.

Microsoft is taking a number of strong measures towards improving its security offerings. The company enabled the use of biometric devices and U2F keys in Windows. Windows Defender, the security software bundled with its Windows OS is on par with any of the paid offerings you can get out there from third-party developers.

The Kaggle competition will be live until March 13, 2019, and it will help generate ideas that can be used to stop malware from functioning at the earliest stages of cyber attacks. Digital security has become a very concerning topic in 2018 with a large number of incidents involving data theft, fraud and other cybercrimes that affect millions of users around the world.

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