AI and Security: Success is learning to wield the power

With all the excitement around AI, I am frequently asked how AI will transform security. As I think about how to answer that question, it’s important to think of the context into how the security world has operated over the past few decades and the role technology plays.

The teams of security professionals are always in a cat and mouse game trying to ensure they don’t miss anything. It’s a game with an inordinate amount of data, and a lot of serendipity. The right person needs to spot the right signal at the right time to be able to catch the incident and fix it.

With the technological advances with Gen AI we have the potential to act at machine speed in being able to ask questions of a system that analyses at a rate and pace we wouldn't expect in the past. As a result, your accuracy and speed in getting to the right outcome has fundamentally changed. This creates an opportunity for changing the game in favor of the defenders!

But we know that its always more than technology. Security people expect the software to have two modes: right or wrong, black or white. When the tool gives you an answer, it's always yes there’s a problem, or no there’s not a problem. The current process and behaviors are based on black and white. There are no shades of grey. Enter AI. ?AI today is an advisor between the black and the white – we need to be willing to embrace the greys.

The initial advent of AI will be very recommendation driven. It's going to suggest that you look in certain places, or double click out here or there. It’s not going to tell you every single time that that's the answer, it's going to focus you in the right vicinity.

Success is going to be based on change in process and mindset. Security professionals must evolve how they work from black and white to various shades of grey to get closer to the answer. AI gives us the technology to augment human ingenuity and expertise. But to make it pervasive, we've got to change the way we work in the SOC, to a place where AI-generated recommendations are an added data point that focus where you are hunting and navigating.

AI is not the easy button everyone wants it to be just yet, but it has the power to revolutionize security. AI allows us to get real-time visibility and context, from which we can investigate threats faster. But you need to learn how to wield the power it holds. The more we're able to operate with AI as a true copilot rather than an answer provider, the faster we will change the game.