teissTalk: Mapping AI to your security posture and avoiding overlooked threats

teissTalk host Jenny Radcliffe was joined by Edward Tucker, Chief Information Security Officer, Co-founder of Email Auth, Byte and Human Firewall; Martyn Booth, Chief Information Security Officer, Euromoney Institutional Investor; and Samantha Humphries, Head of Security Strategy, EMEA, Exabeam.

Views on news

An article on Fortune highlights the fact that AI and advanced automation is unevenly used across the three arms of cyber security. In threat detection it’s employed extensively, but when it comes to prevention and response, it’s underutilised, and humans do the lion’s share of the job. “Attackers use AI and automation on a less complex but still very attractive scale that allows them to exploit flaws in security systems,” the article maintains.

The panel, however, agreed, that at this point attacks are typically automated rather than AI-driven, and often are rather simplistic. Currently, attackers are ahead of cyber security teams in terms of agility and not in how they deploy AI. Journalists and vendors tend to use hyperbole to make existing threats look more dramatic.

However, the real fear is that in the medium term these attacks can get commoditised and that’s what organisations need to get prepared for in the upcoming years. There was also consensus on the panel that, contrary to the article’s statement, attacks always require a series of vulnerabilities to be successful. If there is just one, other controls which are in place will stop the attack.