From the desk of our Training Manager, Katie Pace:
What can I say? Sometimes you’re the trainer. Sometimes the trainee. This last year, the 11 Compliance team has been learning about our new best friend/supreme overlord—AI. Depending on your perspective, AI is a dream or a nightmare. A Strong DM study conducted in 2024 found:
- 87% of cybersecurity professionals [were] concerned about AI-driven threats
- 33% of cybersecurity professionals [felt] “very confident” in their current cybersecurity defenses
The same study found that 65% of the respondents felt their companies were not prepared for AI-driven cyberattacks and 17% felt that their companies were “far behind”.
Despite these rather grim statistics, 2 in 3 cybersecurity professionals felt optimistic about AI’s impact on jobs. With many organizations seeking to reduce headcount with AI, how you feel about it depends, again, on perspective.
For so many of us, the task is daunting. There is so much to learn, and for ethically-minded rule-followers like myself, there’s not a lot guard rails to help us contain this thing. To me, AI has always been like a cool new luxury car—exciting to look at, but the price tag is high and I’m scared to get behind the wheel, let alone drive it to work. However, I’ve never been afraid to learn something new before. So I got in, strapped on my proverbial seatbelt, and backed (slowly) out of the driveway.
Like most good learners, I started with what I knew. I certainly don’t know everything about AI or Cybersecurity, but my English degree taught me at least one valuable skill—research.
The Advantages of AI in Cybersecurity
AI is a powerful ally in the fight against cybercrime. Its strengths lie in speed, scale, and precision:
1. Searching for Characteristics of Cyberattacks: AI analyzes massive datasets to identify patterns and indicators of compromise. This allows teams to detect suspicious login attempts, unusual traffic, and anomalies in real time.
2. Strengthening Defenses: By continuously monitoring systems, AI can isolate compromised devices, block malicious traffic, and predict high-risk vulnerabilities—empowering teams to act before breaches escalate.
3. Authenticating Users More Intelligently: From analyzing biometrics like fingerprints and voice patterns to monitoring typing styles and session behavior, AI enhances user authentication and flags anomalies for additional verification.
4. Attributing Attacks to Threat Actors: By linking tools, IP addresses, and behavioral signatures, AI helps identify specific threat groups, improving understanding and response.
5. Enhancing Phishing and Spam Detection: With the ability to scan links, attachments, and message content, AI tools can block malicious emails before they reach users.
6. Supporting Collaborative Threat Intelligence Sharing: AI enables organizations to both contribute to and benefit from shared threat intelligence networks, creating collective resilience against evolving cyber threats.
In short, AI makes defenses smarter, faster, and more adaptable. But these benefits come with significant risks.
Stay tuned for Part II, Where AI Meets Ethics.
