Australians will soon be fighting fire with fire, as artificial intelligence cyber security firm Cylance prepares to open up operations in Sydney.
The US company recently raised $US42 million ($58 million) in Series C funding in order to step up the sales and marketing of its self-learning software, which it is pitching as an alternative to traditional "signature" anti-virus scanning. 
Speaking to The Australian Financial Review during a flying visit to Sydney, Cylance chief executive Stuart McClure said Australia's rapid take-up of new technologies made it a natural jumping off point for the company's expansion in Asia.
"Places like Australia are more adventurous than say China, which is completely closed off," he said. "Australians like software and they like security."
Mr McClure said his company's software was taking advantage of the same kind of artificial intelligence that hackers were now using.
"The only way to defeat a machine is to use a machine ... and there is a lot of wealth in Australia making it a very attractive target," he said.
"Artificial intelligence algorithms are algorithms that self learn. They learn to classify the good and the bad and any mutations of malware, spyware, ransomware, whatever."
An energetic Californian, McClure sits down at his bulky laptop and pulls up a list of ferocious viruses, freely available to download online.
"What's your favourite virus?" He asks seriously. "Australians often get hit with ransomware so let's get one of those."
Within minutes, McClure has unleashed a host of attacks on his computer and watches web security blockers McAfee and Sophos fail to capture the string of attacks, which seep through the end-point and infect the computer.
"They don't recognise mutations of spyware whereas Cylance can read if it's destructive," he says as he sets up the attack again, this time on CylancePROTECT. Gleefully, he attacks his own security tool and watches the list of blocked viruses grow.
The traditional "signature" detection model of enterprise security relies on authenticating the origin of a digital message and giving the receiver a reason to believe a known sender created the message.
The average cost of a data breach to an Australian business is over $2.5 million a year, according to Deloitte's cyber intelligence centre.