Here's how you can leverage AI to improve your organization's security

While AI has immense potential to drive innovation and efficiency across all sectors, 65% of Latin American business and IT decision-makers who participated in our Dell Technologies Innovation Catalyst survey are concerned that it will create new security and privacy challenges.

Indeed, automated phishing campaigns are becoming more sophisticated, and GenAI is enabling fraudsters to better mimic human behavior. Other examples include compelling social engineering schemes, such as deepfakes that impersonate friends, family, or colleagues. At the software level, we are also seeing autonomous malware that adapts and evolves to avoid detection.

But AI itself can and should be used as a defensive tool.

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Build a secure foundation

It's important to start with good security hygiene, especially as organizations accelerate their adoption of AI. In other words:

-?????? Ensure that the IT environment and assets are secure from product development to deployment.

-?????? Enable multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls to add another layer to minimize vulnerabilities.

-?????? Rely on logging and monitoring tools.? Security professionals rely on data from these tools to identify anomalous behavior that could pose a risk to the organization.

-?????? Have a recovery plan in place in the event of a security incident. This is essential to safely and efficiently restore operations and reduce disruption.

-?????? Adopt zero-trust architectures to harden your environments. This approach is based on the principle that no entity inside or outside the network is trusted by default, and that access to network resources requires verification. It allows only verified and necessary activities.

-?????? Have a robust data strategy that includes management and governance practices. Especially for the AI system using the public cloud.

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Use AI to your advantage

With a secure foundation in place, the next step is the adoption of AI-enabled security solutions. This is because teams that have tools that use machine learning, self-learning, and adaptive defense capabilities can better detect and respond to threats.

In terms of proactive defense, AI can help continuously monitor network traffic, user behavior, and system logs to identify anomalies and suspicious patterns that could indicate malicious activity.

This detection and prevention capability is critical to minimizing the potential damage from cyberattacks. It can learn and adapt as it detects new challenges, helping IT and security teams outmaneuver attackers as they refine their tactics and exploit new vulnerabilities. It also means that organizations can create a customized security response that is effective against threats specific to their industry.

Unfortunately, attackers can get through even the best-protected systems. In these cases, AI can also help with recovery by automating incident response processes. Threat containment, data recovery, and forensic analysis powered by AI can reduce the impact of attacks on the business and speed recovery.

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Empower the team

In addition to building a strong security foundation, organizations must recognize that employees are their first line of defense. Every employee needs to have a basic understanding of how AI is making threats more sophisticated, how to recognize them, and what to do if something doesn't seem right.

This will become even more important as attackers use advanced spoofing attacks created by deepfakes, which add a convincing facade to criminals' well-honed social engineering techniques.

Security professionals also need role-specific training in AI so they have the knowledge and skills to understand how bad actors can use the technology.

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We’re here for you

Latin America has much to gain from public and private sectors that are cyber resilient. This is the way to build a more equitable and sustainable economy.

Cybersecurity is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process - and our team is the best partner for this journey.

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