Security threats ranging from artificial intelligence-based malware to bio-mimicking drones are on the horizon. Kyndryl Inc. aims to stop them in their tracks.

“Organizations are being hammered by ransomware,” said Kris Lovejoy (pictured), global security and resilience practice leader at Kyndryl, which gives its clients vital information about digital security. “We’ve got this massive body of evidence that points to if there was a security incident, this is why it happened, if there was a data center outage, this is why it happened. This informs the strategy that we take to our clients.”

Lovejoy spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay at the Cyber Resiliency Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the security threats facing companies today and the added complexity of generative AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Maximizing infrastructure security

One of the major challenges facing Kyndryl’s clients is compliance with government regulations, according to Lovejoy. 

“Many organizations today … are struggling with how do they address the new resiliency requirements that are coming out from the EU in the form of DORA,” Lovejoy said.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act is a comprehensive set of regulations for financial services firms in the European Union for cybersecurity and risk management.

“This has got everybody really focused on the concept of overall business resilience,” Lovejoy added.

That many companies still pay ransomware is a cause for deep concern, according to Lovejoy, who sees infrastructure simplification as part of the solution.

“[Customers] are recognizing that one of the reasons why they’re not able to recover very quickly or protect themselves … is they got too many vendors,” she said. “This kind of complexity issue is driving customers to really look at how do they simplify their infrastructure … and implement capabilities that really help them get to an overall resilient posture.”

The role of gen AI

Gen AI could have a huge part to play in cybersecurity, particularly when it comes to incident reports on cybersecurity failures, according to Lovejoy.

“We’re on the road to maximizing use of … supervised and unsupervised learning-based machine learning,” she said.

However, letting gen AI detect and respond to security threats without strict supervision would be very unwise, Lovejoy added.

“If you’re going to be using generative AI for threat detection and automated response, it has to be done with guardrails in place,” she said.

Gen AI can be used in highly effective cybersecurity attacks because of its ability to mimic natural language.

“Attackers use generative AI in one really scary way, which is in social engineering,” Lovejoy explained.

A target might experience multi-vector attacks, where multiple voice, email and text attacks come in at the same time.

“That’s very hard to protect against because it just seems so legitimate,” she added.

Other potential misuses of AI is in creating malware — which Lovejoy claims is identifiable because of its unusually “clean” code — and drones that use biomimicry to avoid detection. Nonetheless, the most important thing to keep in mind is whether or not gen AI will solve your business’ problem.

“It’s a tool that gets you to an outcome,” Lovejoy said. “Generative AI might be a great solution within the confines of the problem that you’re trying to solve.”

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