Automation tools are already in the hands of malicious actors, as evidenced by the self-propagating WannaCry and Petya attacks that have swept the globe in recent years. The use of artificial-intelligence technology is likely not far behind.

Earlier this year, a threat actor dumped 2.2 billion unique usernames and passwords on the Dark Web, raising the potential for even more havoc since AI feeds on data and criminal resources are growing.

With malicious actors using increasingly more sophisticated tools to leverage cyberattacks and data breaches, this has forced companies around the globe to “arm up” in defense. Red Hat Inc.’s Ansible Automation Platform is designed to help the cause.

“What we are seeing is that more and more cyberattacks are using automation and artificial intelligence,” said Massimo Ferrari (pictured), consulting product manager, Ansible Security, at Red Hat. “The result is that the velocity and impact of those are so big that you can’t cope with human operators. We’re in a classic situation of fighting fire with fire.”

Ferrari spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AnsibleFest event in Atlanta, Georgia. They discussed the need to manage multiple security solutions and the rise of open-source as a protection technology (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Layer of security integration

One issue Red Hat is seeking to address involves the growth of multiple security solutions for many enterprise organizations. An  industry report recently found that even the smallest businesses are using 15 to 20 security tools on average, with larger firms enabling over 130 solutions.

“Those are great; they protect whatever they have to protect, but there is little or no integration between them,” Ferrari noted. “Security teams have an incredible amount of manual work to do just to correlate data coming from different dashboards or to perform an in-system integration across different perimeters. We propose Ansible as an integrational layer as a glue between all of those different technologies.”

Red Hat’s stake in the security ground with Ansible automation could herald the rise of a greater role among open-source companies in threat protection. Just don’t call them security businesses yet.

“Open-source and security are a fairly new thing,” Ferrari said. “We all know that Red Hat is not a security vendor; we don’t want to be a security vendor. We are automation experts, in the case of Ansible, and we are open-source experts across the board.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AnsibleFest event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE