Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning , Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development

Gen AI: Why Organizations Need to Weaponize the Weapon

The democratization of AI capabilities has proved to be a double-edged sword - both enabling cyberattacks and defending against them. Fleming Shi, CTO at Barracuda, highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence to automate phishing attacks with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

See Also: GDPR & Generative AI: A Guide for Customers

But banning generative AI tools, he said, can do more harm than good. Organizations must learn to leverage AI capabilities, as "weaponizing the weapon that was used against you is the best way to use generative AI."

Generative AI also can assist in cybersecurity awareness training, helping to bridge the skills gap, Shi said. Organizations can use AI to correlate signals, identify threats and deploy countermeasures before attacks escalate. Yes, there are concerns surrounding the misuse of generative AI, but Shi said implementing closed-loop environments and responsible usage can provide a safer way to leverage its benefits.

"If you ask a system with tons of data behind it - be it a SIEM or SOAR, basically ingesting a lot of data around your environment - that you want a piece of information very fast ... now you can use actual English to describe what you want, and the code and query can be generated and that information can be pulled very quickly," he said.

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group at Black Hat USA 2023, Shi also discussed:

• How AI is transforming the threat landscape;
• How businesses can leverage generative AI and what they should consider before deploying AI;
• Opportunities that AI holds for security teams.

Shi focuses on driving transformative technology solutions to support Barracuda's broad portfolio of cybersecurity products and services while nurturing product engineering teams to maximize the feature capabilities.