I don’t nerd out often enough. I do categorize my tech-oriented blog posts as either geek horror or cyber war, but I also claim this blog in no way reflects the opinions of my employer. This post is an exception as I’m going to share some blog posts I have at my employer’s website; but still, this post on my site expresses my personal views.

https://www.tierpoint.com/blog/ai-threat-detection/

That link above speaks to how AI applies to threat detection. There are certainly credible stories on the fears and cautions around the use of AI, but know that threat actors are using AI, so it’s required to counter their tactics. We keep humans in the loop to ultimately control the outcome.

Still, I get the fears. Never in my career have I seen so much hype on a specific tech. With all the talk on job loss and the Singularity with Artificial Super Intelligence, it feels existential. But also, in my career, indeed my lifetime, I’ve only seen technological progress move in one direction. For better or worse.

2000 years ago, Socrates warned against the perils of writing. Clearly, Socrates liked the sound of his own voice, but he thought writing would impair memory as people began to rely upon recorded versions of text. Writing itself was already fairly ancient as cuneiform and Egyptian writing goes back 3,000 years before Socrates, but Greek writing was only a few hundred years old at the time and Greek culture, especially teaching, was largely oral. Socrates also thought that writing would give people lots of information and “reminders,” but not genuine understanding—so they might sound wise while not truly knowing.  He had additional concerns that all sound very much like today’s warnings against Generative AI. We know this because his student Plato wrote it down.

I see Machine Learning (ML) as absolutely essential to detect patterns with the speed needed to keep up with today’s breathless attacks and simply the explosion of data. And Generative AI is extremely useful in producing efficient analysis and recommendations at the speed needed to effectively respond to attacks.

https://www.tierpoint.com/blog/what-is-cyber-threat-hunting/

This second blog post speaks to threat hunting. Admit it, of all the IT disciplines, cybersecurity has the coolest language. With all the automation in place today detecting indicators of attack, assuming you just read the paragraphs above on AI, you’d be remiss, if not a bit arrogant, to think that some threats didn’t evade your automated detections. This is where a data scientist comes into play. Someone not just skilled at security, but a data analyst who can hypothesize a structured approach to discover the unknown unknowns. Read the blog, it’s nerdy, but more interesting than an off-the-cuff Donald Rumsfeld speech.

And stay safe out there.