The road to cyber resiliency will now follow a course through generative artificial intelligence.

That was one of the conclusions drawn from sessions during the Cyber Resiliency Summit, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, today. While the explosion of interest in generative AI may be new, the issues surrounding enterprise security are not, as noted by Shelly Kramer, SiliconANGLE’s tech analyst.

“Every time I listen to these, I feel like these are not new conversations,” she said. “We’ve been talking about security to be a foundational element for a while. The advent of generative AI has sped up the need for us to get our arms around this stuff. We have a lot of work to do.”

Kramer spoke with theCUBE’s industry analysts Rob Strechay, Dave Vallentine and John Furrier during the Cyber Resiliency Summit, and they discussed key lessons learned from the day’s interviews. (* Disclosure below.)

Changing the pace of play

Discussion by a number of participants in the Summit focused on how rapid adoption of generative AI is changing the speed at which organizations must adapt security platforms for data protection and resiliency. This will likely require a flexible approach as threat actors have access to the same technology.

“Generative AI completely changed the pace of play,” Furrier said. “These attack vectors are coming in to get stuff. There is no ‘AppSec’ review for bad guys — they just launch.”

That launch can now include much more sophisticated attacks, where bad actors craft highly believable approaches through email or even deepfake voice messages. Reports have indicated the group behind a highly publicized ransomware attack on MGM Resorts International Inc. and Caesars Entertainment Inc. in September used social engineering and phishing attempts to breach sensitive systems.

“Ransomware used to be poorly written,” Strechay said. “Now, with the advent of generative AI, you can produce really clean ransomware that does not have a lot of fingerprints leading back to you.”

The influence of gen AI adoption has led many organizations to evaluate cybersecurity solutions from the perspective of scale. AI could provide much-needed assistance in this regard, according to Vellante.

“This is a data problem,” he said. “There’s promise that AI can potentially help with that problem, but there’s so much data.”

One of the executives interviewed prior to the analysts’ session was Rob Emsley, director of data protection marketing at Dell Technologies Inc. Emsley spoke about the importance of building a security ecosystem, an approach that resonated with the analysts.

“The multivendor ecosystem is going to be big,” Furrier said. “There is going to be more emphasis on ecosystems and who is partnering with who.”

Gen AI will place additional pressure on monitoring and observability inside systems to spot anomalies that may indicate the presence of a bad actor.

“If you don’t have observability in there, there is stuff going on you have no idea about,” Kramer said. “We’ve been talking about knocking down silos for the last decade. This is not any different.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cyber Resiliency Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Cyber Resiliency Summit.” Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE