Chapter 1 – The Cybersecurity Landscape Today
1.1 The Evolving Threat Environment
- Attack surface expansion: Cloud, IoT, supply‑chain, and remote‑work vectors.
- Sophistication of adversaries: APT groups, ransomware‑as‑a‑service, and automated exploitation.
- Regulatory pressure: GDPR, CCPA, PCI‑DSS, and emerging AI‑specific compliance frameworks.
1.2 Budget and Staffing Constraints
- Talent scarcity: 70% of organizations report difficulty hiring qualified security professionals.
- Cost of tooling: Commercial SIEMs, threat‑intel feeds, and managed services can consume 30–40% of a security budget.
- Operational overhead: Manual triage, alert fatigue, and incident‑response playbook maintenance.
1.3 The Case for AI‑Powered Defense
- Force multiplier: AI can process terabytes of telemetry in seconds, surface hidden patterns, and prioritize alerts.
- Automation of routine tasks: Log parsing, IOC enrichment, and basic triage reduce analyst toil.
- Scalability: Open‑source AI models can run on commodity hardware or low‑cost cloud instances, fitting tight budgets.
1.4 Book Structure Overview
- Foundations: Core security concepts and AI fundamentals.
- Tool‑centric chapters: Each chapter focuses on a specific AI tool or technique and its practical deployment.
- Case studies: Real‑world deployments in small teams, linked to the reference file.
- Implementation guide: Step‑by‑step instructions for building a low‑cost AI security stack.
This chapter sets the stage for why AI is not just a luxury but a necessity for modern security teams operating under resource constraints.