The history of hacking shows that bad actors use good technologies for bad purposes.  Machine learning is no different: it has never been easier for white hats and black hats to obtain and learn the tools of the machine learning trade. Software is readily available at little or no cost, and machine learning tutorials are just as easy to obtain.

Got breach fatigue yet? Yes, it’s been another bad year for computer security. 2016 saw the announcement of the biggest breach ever – the Myspace hack. But, that was quickly eclipsed by the September Yahoo data breach which resulted in the exfiltration of extensive account information, included passwords, from 500 million users.