In today’s episode of Smarter Everything I will be once again talking with Jason Keirstead, VP of Security Strategy for Simbian and former Distinguished Engineer from IBM Security.

Last time Jason and I spoke a bit about the three legged stool of security technology, especially in the context of AI. We also discussed why securing generative AI is such a problem and reviewed a few real world examples. Today we will continue our discussion and look into how threat actors are using AI and how AI can be used to improve cybersecurity.

As cyber criminals, crime syndicates, and threat actors pummel the internet with malware, phishing attacks, and various malicious campaigns, the need for organizations to understand these attacks and learn how to detect and prevent them has grown exponentially over the past 10 years. No longer can organizations wait for and trust some random blog post about an attack to learn what they should do or not do. They need accurate, verifiable, and actionable intelligence that is created and delivered in cyber relevant time.

In today’s episode of Smarter Everything I will be talking with Jon Baker, the co-founder of MITRE Engenuity and its Center for Threat-Informed Defense.

The Center is a research and development organization where Jon partners with sophisticated cybersecurity teams to systematically create practical resources that help all organizations improve their defenses. Jon has extensive experience leading research teams and collaborating with industry to advance cybersecurity capabilities globally.

He has done amazing work leading several key programs, departments, and initiatives at MITRE, for example he led MITRE’s Cyber Threat Intelligence and Adversary Emulation Department and oversaw the work on CALDERA and MITRE ATT&CK®. He also led MITRE’s team in the early development of the OASIS STIX and TAXII standards while supporting the Department of Homeland Security. In addition he led MITRE’s security automation team through the development of SCAP, he managed the CVE team, and was a co-creator of OVAL, a standard language for describing and checking for the presence of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other endpoint artifacts.

As anyone who was able to recently attend BlackHat can attest, right now it seems like it is impossible to talk about cybersecurity without hearing someone bring up AI - but it also seems like everyone means something different when they talk about AI and Security. Not only is it hard to unpack hype from reality, it is seemingly hard to even agree on what reality we are talking about.

In today’s episode of Smarter Everything™ I will be talking with Jason Keirstead, VP of Security Strategy for Simbian. Jason is a former Distinguished Engineer from IBM Security and an expert in threat management, as well as a passionate believer in open security, working in many different open-source and open-standards bodies over the years including OASIS Open, the Open Source Security Foundation, the MITRE Center for Threat Informed Defense, FIRST.org, and more.

Jason is now at Simbian, working to accelerate cybersecurity using Generative AI. We are going to spend some time today trying to deconstruct generative AI and cybersecurity, determine what you should be concerned about, and identify some actions that any organization should be taking right now in order to keep up with the rapid changes in this space.