AI can give defenders a compounding advantage

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 38:39

   Okay, while we're on the topic of models, the model incidents more generally, like where companies have come out and say, with a very transparent front, basically being like, we were evaluating this model and it acted in ways that the researchers didn't intend to during the evaluation. How serious of a cyber risk do you perceive that to be? I think that it gives us the evidence, us, I mean the general industry, it gives us evidence that we need to prepare for a world where AI is attacking our state.

2. 39:16

   And it gives us indications of how this attack could look like or how should we be thinking about these attacks. And one of the things that are the most important when I think about, we call it AI threat readiness. So how do we prepare for these AI-powered threats? And I think that there is no other way to think about it then we have to continuously, we can leverage the benefits of AI in attacking ourselves before others try to do that on our state, right?

3. 39:55

   So we always say best defense is offense, so it's a paraphrase. because actually it's not really going on the offense it's actually using offense against yourself to test your defenses and actually identify these weaknesses or attack path before someone else finds it and i think that on this front attackers in the end have very little knowledge of the environment before they try before they get in right so maybe they know the very the external surface and they can try to pen test it and try to hack inside but they don't know the internals yet and i think that the defenders have a huge advantage in the sense that they do know and they can actually analyze it to really have deep context as they are looking for these attack pests and i think that this is maybe the the biggest advantage that we have as defenders

4. 40:53

   is this level of context that we can put in play before anybody else. The other benefit that we have as defenders is actually the ease of generating the threat intelligence globally. And I want to explain because we've seen these attacks and we all read about it, but the reality that security companies behind the scenes we are automating the process of fingerprinting these patterns and because we're using now AI to do that we can accelerate that process as well so let me give you an example let's say we've seen a supply chain attack in the past it would have taken many many but many minutes or let's say a few hours to actually get the fingerprint, the attack, and the indicator of compromise, and then to propagate it across the environment would take an additional time.

5. 41:59

   Today, we can basically identify that the attack is happening using AI in record speed, in like very few minutes, seconds, because we see a pattern that doesn't add up. AI can actually identify it, propagate, create the indicator of compromise, and propagate it to the rest of the environment. So, the way we are thinking about attacks actually changes in two dimensions. One, we can, now we have resources to test our surface all of the time and try to attack before others do, and second, when something happens, we can actually learn faster than ever in order to make sure we can send immunity to the rest of the environments.

6. 42:40

   So it's very significant advantages that we have as defenders. And the third thing that we need to think of is the model advantage. Over time, I believe that we will be able to train models in a way that will be very specific for the defensive tasks that we need. And this will give us an additional advantage, especially now looking at the, you know, with in the Google context, the ability to actually create very specific models for that is another advantage that we get on top of it.

7. 43:14

   So it's a compounding advantage that we hope that defenders will use. And the ability to see attacks in the lab gives us good intelligence on how should we think about defense in real time.