Acture Solutions had the privilege to be a Gold Sponsor at the Hudson Valley Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit hosted by Dutchess County Office of Central and Information Services (OCIS), in partnership with Marist University.
It was good to be back at the alma mater of so many Acture/CSI employees, including myself. I even got to chat with Dr. Murray for a little bit between sessions! It was great to see so many of you at this important event as well.
The reality is that AI is quickly evolving from a catchy marketing term for anyone's bot into a meaningful tool that, in some cases, can drive dramatic organizational change and deliver tremendous efficiencies.
However, the technology is evolving so quickly that many early adopters report significant issues with data loss, privacy concerns, and out-of-control costs.
There is also an emerging dark side to AI. We are constantly seeing threat actors use AI to refine their phishing campaigns, identify vulnerabilities to exploit at a record pace, and design next-generation malware that evades traditional detection techniques.
Increasingly, the bad guys are succeeding in navigating through our own traditional security defenses. To keep you safe, we must also adapt to this evolving threat.
Like it or not, we must use AI not only for its apparent benefits, but also to increase our defenses at the speed of "now" against these advanced threats.
Plus, we have to keep doing our day jobs. The task before us is daunting.
The concept of layered security defenses or "Defense in Depth" has never been more critical. I believe that three of the most recent Business Email Compromise (BEC) security events that I have been working with area schools on were AI-based. All three of these attacks managed to evade between two and three layers of defense that have been rock-solid at stopping these types of attacks before. Still, each attack would have been quickly stopped and killed if the districts had one of Acture's robust SOC services monitoring all those cloud connections (regardless of whether they were Microsoft or Google). The threat landscape is shifting quickly, and SOCs are hard at work adding AI analysis to their toolkits to become even more responsive. (More on that topic soon).
Acture has been heads-down working on AI across our company, as well as training our staff to use this technology productively. My Acture cybersecurity engineers are working hard on how to protect your networks from internal and external AI threats.
In fact, Cole and I are both spending a week in October listening to the finest security minds from around the world in Academia, Industry, Government, and the Military discuss the latest threats and defenses. AI security will be a significant part of that week.
Successful AI implementations all have a single thing in common, regardless of their purpose: Great implementation and security planning.
I believe this is an area where Acture can provide tremendous value to you.
If you are considering or starting an AI implementation, give us a call. We should begin a discussion on how all of this comes together to both achieve your objective and keep you and your data safe along the way.
Scott F. Quimby
Senior Technical Advisor, CISSP, vCISO
Acture Solutions, Inc.
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