Where is the AI?
Perhaps we just abstract away the underlying technology and look at the results. If a system prevents 99.9% of all attacks, does it even matter whether it is AI-based or not? Is that even relevant? I think it is, as more of the attacks we will see will be AI-driven, and standard defenses will not hold up.
AI as problem solver
Looking to the future and other security segments, AI will play a significant role in identity and access management, helping discover anomalous system access. One CISO hoped AI would finally help solve the insider threat problem, one of today’s thornier areas. In addition, there is a belief that AI will help partially automate some of the Red Team’s responsibilities and perhaps automate all of the Blue Team’s activities.
One topic was the threat that adversaries would use ChatGPT and other AI-based tools to create malicious applications or malware. But another suggested that these same tools could be used to build up better defenses, generating examples of malicious code, before bad actors actually use them, and these examples could then help inoculate the defensive systems.
Another concern is that AI-generated code, without proper curation, will be as buggy or buggier than the human-authored code that it was trained on. This creates vulnerable code at a wider scale than possible and will create new issues for AI-based vulnerability scanners to address.
A final key point was the belief that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others would provide the underlying AI algorithms. The smaller cybersecurity players will own the data and the front-end product that customers interact with. But the back-end brain would leverage tech from one of the bigger players. So, in theory, an AI-based security company won’t technically own the AI.
AI in the future
We are in the early days of AI’s penetration into our security defenses. While AI has been in the research community for decades, the technologies and platforms that make it practical and deployable have just been launched in the past few years. But where will things be in the next 5-10 years?
I have a clear investment thesis on AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions and believe we will see much broader and deeper enterprise penetration within the next decade. From the point of view of my experts, the general beliefs are that AI will become a reality in multiple segments, including the three mentioned above.
While the experts believe AI will play an increasingly important in every segment of security, chances are higher in areas like:
- Fraud detection
- Network anomaly detection
- Discovery of deep fake content, including in corporate websites and social media assets
- Risk analysis, and
- Compliance management and reporting (In fact, AI will likely create a new compliance headache for organizations, as more AI-focused regulations will create the need for new processes and policies)
There is so much uncertainty about where AI resides today in cybersecurity solutions and what it does or doesn’t do. But I believe this uncertainty will drive entrepreneurs to create a new wave of products to help navigate this new frontier. This will likely go well beyond cybersecurity, covering all the software products used in an organization.
AI applications over the next 5-10 years will be fascinating, to be sure. Today’s hype may be more than the reality, but plenty of surprises will be ahead as this market evolves.
