Artificial Intelligence: A New Tool in the Hacker's Arsenal

Leal, let's, let's start in the following. Now I'm in the more than 40 years in the arena of it and a lot of revolution I have seen come and go. But I would say at the moment there is really a deep, deep re revolution and why it is now a little bit different than the days before. We said this in it always, but I guess there is fundamentally some change, especially with artificial intelligence. It's not a long art for artificial intelligence, but it's a driving force. Why is this so, so important, especially in cyber defense, in cybersecurity?

Because with AI the costs to for cyber attacks are reduced dramatically. But it's not only that the cost is reduced, but you can use it and to be more sophisticated in the attack. So the quality is in the same time increased and the most challenging topic I see is also you need not anymore a lot of skills to drive sophisticated attacks. So the quality, the speed and the costs are improved and the driving force is AI and therefore I would say this is now really on the horizon. Horizon.

Then you can say, okay, the cyber guys are telling this always, but on the other side I have a lot of evidence and what we see over the last weeks, months, what's coming and what we have to tackle. Take the example of of spearfishing, we had some spearfishing attacks, but nowadays you getting scaled up spear phishing attacks and then you have to have in your organization hundreds or thousands of spear phishing attacks at the same times.

It's really to handle this as really a very challenging, you have to improve your human firewall but you have also to defend in such a way that you have to, I implement a lot of automatic responses and therefore you are always forced to use artificial intelligence in the cyber defense because it's used in the offense. Then you have to use it also in the cyber defense and what I mean here with the cyber defense, how to use now AI as the following.

When you see that the attack is coming, you have not, they are are popping up a lot of alerts, sickness in milliseconds, how to handle all these alerts you have to follow and risk base approach. What does this mean? You have to think about what are the most risky cases at the moment always, which you can investigate with your cyber defense people with your cyber defense tools. This means you go from a alert based cyber defense to a risk-based cyber defense and then it's a risk.

The a tricky thing how to in define the most and most inter challenging risk and there you can help of course normal analytics use cases but more and more you have to ECMO augment this with ai. So you see the attackers is improving, they are the attacker scaling up, they are and tons of attacks can come in parallel and on the other side you have to use this also in the defense then and next challenge. And here in copying a call conferencing conferences, we had always this topic and the topic was anomaly detection.

When your identity is hack, it's not so much about that you have male verse in your systems but your identity is is hacked. And then I would say how you want to identify anonymously detection in a risk page approach to define use cases or to manage this in cases without ai, this is impossible. You have to use for this exam for ity detection you have to use ai but bad luck to use ai. You have also the challenge of our this problem of false positive, how you overcome now the false positive and therefore a a, a strong prerequisite to use ai.

It's not only that you have to train your people to use the tools but you have another prerequisite and it's always this prerequisites you have to use central identity provider, you have to implement a zero trust environment that you can verify the identities that you can use and this is not understood in product environment that you have to prepare a lot of your legacy environment and make it ready for these, I would say AI driven new cyber attack environment because you have to invest not only in AI capabilities for the defense but you have to prepare also your environment that you can use effectively and efficiently.

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Ah, okay. So then I try to to find a way. So what I said before, yes we are in a revolution and we have to to invest and to invest in AI capabilities to use AI for cyber defense.

But all on the other side we have to prepare our environment, our our capabilities, our tools and our applications to be prepared for this new world and therefore for this new world, this means that you have to bring in really now what we always told over the last 10 years, identity and access management, a proper identity and access management is the prerequisite for cybersecurity and therefore IT AI will show this, that this is a prerequisite. Why?

Because, and I summarized what I said before, the cost to to run cyber attacks are reduced. They are more sophisticated, they are more scaling up at the coming much faster in a much higher scale and therefore you have to prepare to be prepared to identify immediately the highest risk in your environment and to react to response response quickly to contain their attacks.

And I always saying, and perhaps we can go then a little bit in this discussion, what you can do in this defense when there is, and I always said at the moment we have the law of the jungle is valid for cyber risk and the law of the jungle means either you are fast or you are food and bad luck. Sometimes it helps when you have luck and therefore we should not trust anymore and AI will show us that you can trust in your luck that you have permanently to invest because the attacks are permanently better and therefore you have permanently in invest in your cyber defense capability.

And I can tell you never work alone. You have to have in this scenario really good partners which help you to manage these risks. And I would say we have to find a way that we have now in each and every IT investment so to speak, a cyber tax, A cyber defense tax, you can argue whether this is 5% or 10% which you have to invest in cyber cybersecurity. And this is to build up really capabilities, cybersecurity capabilities. It's not alone tools. It's not only methodology, it's people, tools, partnership and methodologies. And this is my me message here.

Yes, we have a permanent race. You have not to fear but you have to invest and do your homework or homework and it's not enough that you say we stay with our legacy, we have to make it, the legacy is ready for this cloud AI quantum environment and then it's not believing. Then you see the regulator and the regulator is becoming also really tougher and tougher.

Why he set not up all all the requirements on IT compliance, but he is testing more and more the effectiveness of your cybersecurity controls and when you are not effective, you have a problem and I see and I will end a little bit with an additional risk everybody has at the moment because when you, the regulator is doing now the following when something had happened and you have a red where attack or a huge damage, then he's checking whether you were compliant IT compliant or not.

And when they can show that the cso, the CIO and the chief executive officer have not done their job properly and there was were not compliant, then you have not only the damage of your cyber attack but you are also guilty and you are sometimes in us, you can then go straightforward in jail to jail. Therefore this is the challenge that when something's happening, the regulators are also checking whether you have have done your, done your job properly before to be IT compliant.

So many thanks for listening to me and I'm eager to, to get some questions and I can tick in much deeper whenever you like.