How one cybersecurity startup is using AI to keep clients safe

Yahoo

4 days ago

Artificial intelligence has become a key part of cybersecurity. It's helping cybersecurity companies keep their customers' data safe, but, unfortunately, it's also a new tool for criminals to exploit.
Arctic Wolf (ARWO.PVT) CEO and president Nick Schneider joins Asking for a Trend with Josh Lipton to discuss how his company, valued at more than $4 billion, is leveraging AI to fight those who want to use the technology for harm.
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Let's talk about AI, a trend investors are very excited about. How is your company leveraging that tech?
Yeah, so there's two primary ways. First of all, AI's been used in cybersecurity for a long time. There's two primary ways you can use it kind of in the back end or in the core of the platform to be able to make sense of all the data that you're ingesting. So, for example, our business is ingesting now somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 trillion security events a week. But our average customer is only really actioning, gonna call it two to three of those alerts per week. And really the magic between those two numbers is all through automation and AI, in AI. Now, that's not really customer facing. That's a lot of what's happening in the back end. The second way to leverage it is through LLMs or engagement with the end user of themselves. So, like, for example, we have a product called Cypher. It's an AI assistant. And effectively what that allows end customers to do is understand the data that they're getting through the platform to be able to take action within their environment or do something within their business.
And we talked about how you're using AI. How are the bad guys using it?
Yeah, the easiest one to like really wrap your head around is through like fishing campaigns, right? So it used to be a world where a fishing campaign was actually pretty easy to, you know, point out if you were an individual and you were paying attention. Now they've gotten pretty sophisticated, right? So the emails are written really well. They use logos that are really well depicted, the headers that they leverage for the emails that they send are really hard to decipher, like a one versus an I, for example. So so they've gotten really sophisticated with leveraging AI and then, you know, also leveraging the AI in a bulk fashion to do that to, you know, thousands of people at once as opposed to trying to kind of do it in a piecemeal fashion.
When you talk about bad guys, Nick, who are we talking about in broad strokes?
Yeah. Yeah, I got this question today, too. So um, so bad actors in general, generally speaking they're in groups of bad actors and I think that's where we see the majority of the activity. So those can be actually organizations in certain countries, or individuals now with the advent of AI can do this from their home. Uh but then you also see in certain industries concerned over like nation states, right? So if you're in critical infrastructure, anything that might be, you know, critical to a country or an organization that would be interesting to a nation state, you'll see some nation-state activity as well.