The cybersecurity industry needs to ‘fight fire with fire’ when it comes to AI, according to Integrity360’s Brian Martin.
Earlier this month, cybersecurity company Integrity360 hosted the Dublin edition of its global cybersecurity conference, Security First.
Held on 10 March, the conference saw cyber security experts and companies from across the country flock to the Aviva Stadium to sit through a number of discussions and panels, all exploring pressing topics and uses of the internet.
Richard Ford, CTO at Integrity360, told SiliconRepublic.com at Aviva that the Security First series of events provides an opportunity to bring together some thought leaders from across the Internet industry.
“Even within Integrity, but also in all the industry because I think it’s important to get many voices,” he said.
But what does ‘safety first’ mean?
Ford told us that the term refers to the Integrity360 model and cybersecurity perspective, which is to “enable organizations to look at the entire cybersecurity lifecycle, and look at it holistically, rather than looking at just one part”.
He explained that cybersecurity needs to be an organization-wide priority, rather than just an IT concern.
“You know, it can’t just be technology, it can’t be experts, analysts, engineers. It has to come from the top of the organization to think, in fact, cybersecurity is important, it’s one of our important risks in our business,” he said.
“So we need to take that seriously and put the right effort, the right spending and the right focus into it to make sure we’re not the next organization that’s going to be in the headlines and be broken.”
Human-AI time
This year, the theme of the conference was ‘Resilience Redefined: Securing the Human-AI Era’, where the event explores “how AI, machine ownership and changing regulations are reshaping corporate defence”, according to the company.
Although AI has become a great opportunity for today’s cyber security teams, it has also introduced many cybersecurity threats.
“It’s not so much that AI is actually finding new things to use, but rather that it can perform many tasks for itself that would normally be done by human attackers,” explains Brian Martin, director of product management for Integrity360.
“Therefore, they can get exposure very quickly, they can quickly adapt to the blockers they find, and they can take out more phases of the attack automatically and at scale.”
Chris Hosking, AI and cloud security evangelist at SentinelOne, said AI has impacted cybersecurity by “empowering the threat landscape”.
“It’s done [threat actors] immediately, it made them more advanced than before and lowered the barrier to entry,” he said.
However, he stressed that AI also offers many opportunities for cyber security teams. “We can have a tremendous edge if we move to things like agent auto triage, automated investigation. But we’re really just dipping our toes into what AI can do for us, but there’s a lot of potential ahead.”
Martin agreed, saying that cybersecurity teams need to “fight fire with fire” by using AI technology.
“We need to be able to move away from some of the manual and kind of piecemeal visibility that we’ve had in order to be able to respond to that increasing scale and speed of attacks.”
With the scale and complexity of cyber security and cyber threats greater than ever, many conference attendees had advice for companies that may be wondering how to adapt.
Niall Errity, director of professional services at Vectra, said companies need to “understand their gaps in their network”.
“I think a lot of organizations tend to focus too much on one or two tools,” he said. “They think, ‘Oh, I have EDR [endpoint detection and response] installed on my endpoints and I’m much better now, no need to worry about anything else beyond that’.
“Unless they do proper analysis in their areas, do proper testing to make sure they’re resilient, they’re not going to really know their gaps. So my recommendation would be to keep an eye on what’s happening in the news, what’s happening in the organizations. Take what you learn and assess your own environment to make sure those gaps are closed.”
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