AI is changing the cybersecurity game. And new strategies are needed to win.

AI is changing the cybersecurity game. And new strategies are needed to win.

By: Lloyd Webb, VP sales engineering, EMEA, SentinelOne

Generative AI has opened the door to a new and sophisticated set of threats to the enterprise. Adversaries are using the technology to execute machine speed attacks with less dwell time. Deepfakes are increasingly being used to destabilise trust and run scams. Phishing is becoming more sophisticated.

While attackers used to be content with targeting vulnerable devices to gain access to credentials, adversaries are now moving beyond breaking and entering, using AI to tailor what people consume, and the ability to turn an employee into an insider is more within reach than ever.

Hackers have also figured out how to use AI to observe and predict how defenders will respond to their malware evasion techniques and adjust them on the fly. And there is a proliferation of adaptive malware, polymorphic malware, and autonomous malware propagation.

All of this has made cyberspace an increasingly dangerous and difficult environment to defend. And there are no police to help. To protect themselves, companies need to see around corners and structure their technology to protect against new and emerging threats that they may not yet understand.

A New Era of Security

Security today is no longer just about threat detection and prevention. It’s about gaining visibility and insight into data across the entire enterprise and transforming this data into decisive action to protect business and mitigate risk. And to do it, organisations will need to think outside the box.

Many enterprises rely on traditional point solutions to secure endpoints, networks, cloud assets and identities in isolation. The evolving nature of threats demands a more integrated strategy.

A More Modern Approach

As AI technologies bring new and more sophisticated threats to the enterprise every day, unified security stands out as the central theme for enterprise cybersecurity in 2024. This progressive approach involves seamlessly integrating various security solutions and technologies into a unified, cohesive system.

The push toward unified security is driven by a quest for simplicity. In the face of tight IT budgets and a critical shortage of cyber talent, organisations are looking to reduce complexity, streamline security operations, and reduce the risk of human error.

To effectively thwart the barrage of attacks they face, security teams must be able to see their data across every endpoint, every connection, and every transaction on every cloud. And in order to connect the dots, they have to be able to connect all the dots. Point solutions make this tough to do for a few reasons. First, they focus on a narrow set of data sources or attack vectors. They also require multiple agents, alert queues, and investigation pages to piece things together, which IT teams lack the time and talent to manage.

Unified platforms simplify security, as they seamlessly ingest data from any source into a single console, allowing teams to see everything all at once, in one place. And they provide the speed and visibility needed to centralise, process, and convert this data, at massive scale, into real-time actionable intelligence. When this data is augmented with the precision of AI, a totally new realm of security can be unlocked.

The Power of AI

AI, in essence, gives enterprises superpowers to secure a broader range of assets better than humans alone can, as they aren’t limited by how many people are in their Security Operations Centre or the expertise of their team. With AI, they have an always-on super analyst that can see things in real time, at scale, and defend their environment against attacks at the machine speed with which they are executed.

Leveraging AI in cybersecurity also opens up a new range of opportunities to address the cyber skills gap. With AI, security analysts can dramatically shorten their investigation times to detect and respond to threats. The technology helps with the heavy lifting of threat hunting, summarisation of large quantities of data, even giving suggestions about what and where to hunt next.

Securing Tomorrow

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it’s imperative that organisations be able to stitch together data from across the enterprise and create a cohesive fabric to protect their business no matter what vector or attack is. Unified platforms are the most efficient, cost-effective way to do this, and companies that embrace them can deliver the future of security today.