The cybersecurity industry needs to ‘fight fire with fire’ when it comes to AI, according to Integrity360’s Brian Martin.

Earlier this month, cybersecurity company Integrity360 held the Dublin edition of its global cyber conference, Security First.

Held on 10 March, the conference saw cybersecurity experts and companies from across the country flock to the Aviva Stadium to sit in on a number of keynotes and panels, all exploring a wide variety of pressing cyber topics and trends.

Richard Ford, CTO at Integrity360, told SiliconRepublic.com at the Aviva that the Security First series of events provides an opportunity to bring some thought leaders from across the cyber industry together.

“From inside Integrity as well, but also from across industry because I think it’s important to get multiple voices,” he said.

But what does ‘security first’ mean?

Ford told us that the term refers to Integrity360’s model and view of cybersecurity, which is “to enable organisations to look at the full life cycle of cybersecurity, and look at it holistically, rather than just looking at one single segment”.

He explained that cybersecurity needs to be a whole-of-organisation priority, rather than just an IT concern.

“You know, it can’t just be a technology, it can’t be the technologists, the analysts, the engineers. It has to come from the very top of the organisation to think, actually, cybersecurity is important, it’s one of our key risks to our business,” he said.

“So we need to take that seriously and put the right effort, the right spend and the right focus on it to make sure that we are not the next organisation to be in the headlines and get breached.”

Human-AI era

This year, the conference theme was ‘Resilience Redefined: Securing the Human-AI Era’, with the event examining “how AI, machine identities and changing regulations are reshaping organisational defence”, according to the company.

While AI has certainly become a top opportunity for today’s cybersecurity teams, it has also introduced considerable cyberthreats as well.

“It’s not so much that AI is actually finding new things to exploit, but rather that it can automate a lot of the activities that normally would be performed by human attackers,” explained Brian Martin, Integrity360’s director of product management.

“So therefore, they can find exposures a lot faster, they can adapt more quickly to blockers that they find, and then they can execute more and more stages of the attack autonomously and at scale.”

Chris Hosking, AI and cloud security evangelist at SentinelOne, said AI has impacted cybersecurity by “empowering the threat landscape”.

“It’s made [threat actors] faster, it’s given them more sophistication than they’ve had before and it’s also lowered the barrier to entry,” he said.

However, he emphasised that AI also provides considerable opportunities for cyber defence teams. “We can have a phenomenal edge if we move to things like agentic auto triage, auto investigation. But we’re really sort of only dipping our toes right now into what AI can do for us, but a lot of opportunity ahead.”

Martin agreed, stating that cybersecurity teams need to “fight fire with fire” by utilising AI technology.

“We need to be able to move away from some of the manual and sort of fragmented visibility that we’ve had in order to be able to respond to that increasing scale and rapidity of attack.”

With the scale and complexity of cybersecurity and cyberthreats greater than it’s ever been, plenty in attendance at the conference had advice for companies that might be wondering how to adapt.

Niall Errity, director of professional services at Vectra, said that companies need to “understand their own gaps in their own network”.

“I think a lot of organisations tend to be very one or two tool-focused,” he said. “They think, ‘oh, I have an EDR [endpoint detection and response] installed on my endpoints and I’m perfectly fine now, I don’t need to worry about anything else beyond that’.

“Unless they’re doing the proper analysis in their own environments, doing proper testing to really make sure they’re resilient, they won’t really know their own gaps. So my recommendation would be to constantly look at what’s happening in the news, what’s happening with organisations. Take those learnings and test your own environments to make sure that you have those gaps closed.”

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