Microsoft has introduced a new artificial intelligence system, Project Ire, that can autonomously detect, analyse, and block malware without any human intervention. Still in its prototype phase, the tool shows it could set a new “gold standard” for malware detection and analysis in early tests. Microsoft, in its blog post, shared that Project Ire is being developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research, Microsoft Defender Research, and Microsoft Discovery & Quantum. It uses advanced techniques like decompilation and control flow analysis to reverse-engineer software files, even when it has no prior knowledge of their origin or function.
Microsoft aims to build this technology into Microsoft Defender as a new feature called Binary Analyser, which would spot dangerous files the moment they show up, even in memory.
Microsoft claims that the Project Ire correctly detected 9 out of 10 malicious files in early real-world tests, which is promising. However, it only managed to catch about a quarter of all malware in recall tests. The false positive rate was around 4%, which is relatively low for an AI in early development.
In another test using a mix of real and fake Windows drivers, the tool performed even better, detecting 90% of threats, but with a recall score of 0.83 and a lower false positive rate of just 2%.
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Project Ire generates reports on every suspicious file it flags, pointing out exactly which parts of the code raised red flags. This could help security teams respond more effectively. “This kind of work has traditionally been done manually by expert analysts, which can be slow and exhausting,” Microsoft explained. Notably, security researchers often suffer from alert fatigue and burnout, making it difficult to maintain consistency across large-scale malware detection.