📡 Cybersecurity Innovation Pulse #16: Causal AI in Security Products; Avg. Data Breach Cost is Now $4.45M; SEC Tightens Breach Disclosure; and More!
Covering July 19th - 27th
Welcome to Issue 16 of the Cybersecurity Innovation Pulse! I'm Darwin Salazar, your guide to the dynamic world of cybersecurity innovation. Each week, I deliver the latest on product launches, groundbreaking innovations, strategic collaborations, and other developments at the intersection of innovation and cybersecurity. If you find value in these updates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for access to our archive and exclusive posts. Subscribing ensures you receive these insights directly, saving time and keeping you ahead of the curve.
Top Stories
Tech Giants Agree to AI Safeguards
In collaboration with the Biden administration, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all committed to third-party oversight of their commercial AI systems. The specifics of the audit system or auditors have yet to be disclosed. The companies also agreed to methods for reporting vulnerabilities and to use digital watermarking to distinguish between real and deepfakes, and to help combat misinformation. They have committed to publicly reporting flaws and risks in their technology, including effects on fairness and bias.
This all sounds good on paper, but it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it and whether these tech giants would be held accountable if things do go left. Read more
Forrester Announces DR-DLC for Detection Engineering
Forrester has announced the Detection and Response Development Lifecycle (DR-DLC) for detection engineering. This post helps demystify detection engineering by applying software development principles to the detection and response development lifecycle. My favorite part of the report is the visual below. As shown, unit testing is the only step that is carried out through the entire lifecycle which highlights its’ importance. Read more
Data Breach Costs Reach New Highs
IBM Security's 2023 report reveals that the global average data breach cost has increased to $4.45 million, up 15% over the last three years. The report also highlights the significant role of AI in automating data breach management, with AI deployment resulting in average data breach cost savings of nearly $1.8 million. Read more
Africa's Cybersecurity Improvements and Challenges
Cybersecurity preparedness across the African continent is improving but still lacks agreements on international security standards and cross-country collaboration as seen in places like the EU. This 41-page report by Kearney Consultancy found that "Countries in the region lack the strategic mindset, policy preparedness, and institutional oversight needed to address cybersecurity issues," and that any collaboration is mostly voluntary. For a region that is pivotal to the rest of the world and that has suffered from a variety of attacks over the past, I think it’d be great to see the US and the EU step in to help African countries become more cyber resilient. Read more
New SEC Rule on Cybersecurity Disclosures
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has adopted rules requiring public companies to disclose all cybersecurity breaches that could affect their bottom lines within four days. Delays will only be permitted if immediate disclosure poses serious national security or public safety risks. Read more
Security Product Innovation
ConductorOne has announced the release of its Cloud Privileged Access Management (CPAM) solution. The solution is designed to provision just-in-time (JIT) and least privileged access to critical resources and services across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments. What stands out most to me from this release is that the solution meets developers and security engineers where they are with integration support for homegrown apps, being able to define permissions as code, and managing IAM via their “Cone” CLI tool. Read more
Dynatrace has combined predictive Causal AI with GenAI in its Davis AI product leading to what they’re calling the first “Hypermodal AI” engine in the observability and security industries. While there’s some contention on that claim covered in the attchd. article, I believe this highlights the beginning of a trend. Read more
A Bit More on Causal AI
GenAI excels at interpreting complex inputs and producing valuable insights and content. However, its capabilities fall short when it comes to discerning cause-and-effect relationships. This is where Causal AI steps in. Rather than merely identifying patterns or correlations in data, Causal AI strives to comprehend why certain outcomes transpire based on various variables or actions.This is crucial in the realm of cybersecurity. If properly calibrated, Causal AI can help pinpoint the root causes of security incidents or breaches. It can even simulate the potential outcomes of different security measures, providing a predictive edge. Of course, having not seen causal AI in action in a security context, I’m skeptical of what it can achieve but I’m still fairly excited about what it can do when properly combined with other types of AI.
SentinelOne has launched its Cloud Data Security product line with the release of Threat Detection for Amazon S3 and Threat Detection for NetApp. Leveraging SentinelOne's ML-backed threat detection technology, these solutions automatically scan every file added to NetApp and object to Amazon S3 storage for file-born and zero-day malware. If a malicious file is detected, SentinelOne will auto-remediate and quarantine it. Given that S1 is a leader in the endpoint security space and has great malware detection capabilities, this play makes a lot of sense. Read more
Sysdig has launched a generative AI assistant, Sysdig Sage. Sysdig Sage uses multistep reasoning to uncover hidden connections, prioritize risks, and accelerate investigations. It has also been trained on Falco’s open source community knowledge such as its threat detection rules and it provides tailored security recommendations. It also leverages natural language processing (NLP) to create detection rules as shown below. Read more
Microsoft has released Defender for IoT Firmware Analysis in Public Preview mode. The service provides SBOM, CVE, Binary Hardening, PKI and SSL cert. analysis by scanning the binary image running on the device. Microsoft cannot be stopped 😤 Read more
Netskope has enhanced its data loss prevention capabilities with improvements for its SkopeAI product. These enhancements provide better protection for unstructured data via automated data classification and “Train your own classifiers” capabilities. Read more
Stellar Cyber now offers Extended Detection and Response (XDR) for Operational Technology (OT) environments. This solution provides continuous security monitoring, threat detection, and response capabilities for OT networks, helping protect critical infrastructure. Read more
Checkmarx has announced its CheckAI Plugin for ChatGPT, the industry's first plugin to detect and prevent potential attacks against ChatGPT-generated code. The plugin enables developers and security teams to protect against attacks caused by malicious open source packages and dependencies while working within the ChatGPT interface. The plugin is available today for free in the ChatGPT plugin store. Read more
Akamai Technologies has launched three new cloud computing sites, marking a major step in its push to put compute, storage, database, and other services on top of the same underlying backbone that powers its edge network today. The new sites are strategically located in Paris, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with Seattle and Chennai, India opening later this quarter. It’ll be interesting to see what the next 5 years look like for Akamai. In my opinion, they are gearing up for a battle with the top cloud giants 🌶️ Read more
More Insights
Conclusion
That’s all for this week folks! If you have any feedback on what you enjoyed or didn’t like about this week’s issue, please share! Lastly, if you found value in this week’s issue, consider becoming a paid subscriber for more exclusive insights!