Steve Manley’s Post

Transcript

Hello again, it's good to be with you now with AI driven threats on the rise, how can Australian businesses stay one step ahead when it comes to the cyber security arms race? Well, for more we're joined by Steve Manley, Vice President, NZ at Palo Alto Networks. Good to have you on the program. How are criminals making use of AI to attack businesses? What are you saying? Well, Mike, we're seeing a few things. So first and foremost, they're attacking with a lot more speed and a lot more sophistication. So I'll give you 2 examples. We all familiar with fishing and now you don't see the grammar mistakes. In fact, that can be far more targeted even with spear fishing around, scraping social media and really targeting. Another one, you know, really good example for me would be the SolarWinds attack a few years ago that was very prevalent, but it it actually required a lot of manual work to be done on the adversary side. Today that could all be automated. So the impact of something like solar winds would just be so much greater. Yeah, absolutely. Our Australian companies ready for these AI driven cyber threats. Look, Mike's, they, are they taking steps toward it? Are they ready? Look, I'll give you that four years ago, it was 9 days for a successful attack and today it's in hours and the average time to remediate is 6 days. So a gap like that should be concerning for businesses. The goals got to be how do we get this into real time? So detecting and then remediating in real time. So there's a lot of work to do and AI is going to play a critical part in how we do that. OK, well, let's talk a little bit about why platform. Consolidation is key when it comes to fighting AI threats moving forward. I, I think there's a couple of elements that are really important. The 1st is you need huge amounts of data, but you need to be sure that that data is accurate and that data can be essentially used. So platform typically will use a central data pool. And then again, coming back to the accuracy of that data, what you ultimately want these systems to do is act in real time. So what that means is making a decision using that data. And you can only do that if you have high fidelity data. So for example, if Paula, we focus on precision AR. It's underpinned by really good, high quality data, but that enables you to remediate in real time and detect in real time. Look, that's the goal. Organizations that got a long way to go, but we're on track and platforms will have to play a key role in in how we do that. Yeah, absolutely. So how is Palo Alto Networks leading the AI arms race? Take us through a little bit about how your team is, you know, planting their stake in the ground. Well, Mike, we, we really fortunate we have the largest data set on the globe that like I said, it's got a lot of high fidelity and then we're spending billions of dollars in integrating tools. So if you think about it, again, coming back to that platform approach, everything needs to work together. You need to be able to make those decisions and then execute how you're immediate in real time. So all our investments are going into ensuring through a combination of engineering efforts and acquisitions on how we can bring all these technologies into our platform. And then yeah, we're partnering with some of the biggest. Organizations and government organizations across the globe to really stay in front of the adversaries because this is a team effort and we can't do it alone. So yeah, we're super excited. We, we definitely think this is a solvable problem as well, but we have to be embracing the technology because I'll add the adversaries, they innovating too, like we're not the only ones that are, are they well funded? So yeah, we, we, we're confident that we can stay in front of this. But yeah, we've got to keep innovating. Yeah, absolutely. Innovators, everything continues to get faster and faster. But what should businesses prioritize to boost their defences? Steve, if you could give us something for the people at home to, you know, take into the business. Well, I, I think first and foremost, I've, you know, I've talked about it a few times, you have to understand your mean time to detect and your mean time to respond. And we should be measuring those things up from a business perspective. I would encourage all business leaders to ask their teams what, what are those two numbers and are we reducing that so we can get closer to real time? And then there's a lot of four for people at home. We spend a lot of time around education. We, we have a program called Cyber Fit Nation. I often talk about the importance of cyber awareness. From kindy all the way to the boardroom and having all the parents right now, you know, I'm encouraging, you know, you gotta take that concept from kindy all the way to retirement because again, the adversaries, they, they don't discriminate who they target, right? They target the most well funded defences all the way through to the most vulnerable. So there's a lot of a lot of enablement that we need to do and a lot of education. So yeah, look at for Cyber Fit Nation as well. It's a great program. It's free, it's readily available. Steve, I want to thank you for joining us on the program and giving us a timely reminder of the speed at which these things. Are going appreciate you reminding us again on the program. Thanks, Mark. Great to be here. Take care. And of course, thank you to all of you for tuning in. Hopefully you learned something from my chat with Steve. There's definitely some stuff to do some research into when it comes to defending yourself online. I'm gonna add password changes and two factor authentication, but that's just me. All the best. You're watching Ticker. We'll have more in just a few minutes.