AI has revolutionized every industry, advancing at an unprecedented pace. Security leaders looking for a way to leverage AI to improve the security posture and practices at their organizations are overwhelmed with choices of available AI tools and methodologies. This can make adopting AI into an organization’s security framework a daunting task at the outset.
At Wiz, we’ve talked about AI from several angles, such as protecting against AI risks with AI-SPM and the Wiz’s Research Team discovery of Microsoft’s AI data leak. But the other AI topic that comes up a lot in conversation with our customers is: security leaders want to know, not just how can I secure my AI environments, but how can I use this power of AI to maximize the impact of my security team?
And we've seen many wonderful examples of how security teams have harnessed the power of traditional AI and Generative AI, so we want to share some examples here. We also follow the same principles here at Wiz to help us shape the new GenAI features we are adding to Wiz’s AI-powered security capabilities.
We look at AI adoption the same way we look at cloud transformation in your organization — it starts first with people, then processes, and then technology. The demands on security teams are constantly changing and growing, and companies can't hire their way out of this. AI can help deliver efficiency and accuracy so even a small team can have a big impact.
People: use AI to bridge the skill gap
One of the biggest challenges security organizations face is around talent shortage, hiring, and retention. This is common across the cybersecurity industry and especially prominent in cloud security. As environments grow, so does the need for cloud security, but organizations struggle to hire new security personnel as quickly as their environments grow. This is one instance in which AI can become a force-multiplier for your security team: by helping to upskill your staff on security practices.
The VirusTotal report, How AI is shaping malware analysis, provides an example on how AI can be used to bridge the cybersecurity expertise gap in Europe: "AI’s ability to identify and explain malicious code in simple language could reduce the need for highly-specialized malware analysis skills in cybersecurity: helping bridge the gap of Europe’s missing 500,000 cybersecurity experts."
In the past, security tools required security experts to operate them; individuals who understood the nuances of cloud security and who were familiar with specific tools. But today, security leaders can leverage AI to simplify the human-to-machine interaction with security tools, making security practices accessible for non-security experts across the organization.
For example, teams can use AI to convert natural language to queries, empowering users to search for security risks by using simple questions. In this way, non-security experts can quickly identify risks in the environment without having to ramp up on query languages such as Sigma, Rego, YARA, SQL, and OVAL.
Additionally, teams can use AI to generate remediation steps quickly, greatly reducing the time a security engineer or developer might spend understanding the context around a risk. AI can efficiently analyze data about an attack path in the cloud and produce remediation guidance. It is important to note that any AI-generated content should undergo a human review to ensure no new risks are being introduced into the environment.
Process: use AI to build efficiency and increase velocity
As you are implementing a cloud security program, you might find yourself asking “How do I stand relative to my peers?". This is a common question among security leaders in the desire to benchmark their team against others in the industry or organizations at a similar maturity level. Since AI can process large amounts of data quickly it can guide you toward recommendations based on what other organizations similar to yours are implementing for cloud security.
For example, it can let you know you should start using Service Control Policies (SCPs) based on other organizations like yours or compare the time it takes your team to remediate critical risks compared to others of similar size. AI security tools can also help to detect control gaps in your environment by doing a baseline analysis of your security policies and providing a set of guidelines you should implement.
Technology: use AI to enhance existing security practices
AI-powered technology can accelerate and transform your existing cloud security with enhanced anomaly and threat detection capabilities. Cloud environments are complex, which means that effectively identifying threats in real time can be difficult and exposure to a breach can be a matter of hours. Doing so requires quickly analyzing data from many different data sources to find pattern deviations. AI-powered tools can swiftly process and identify patterns in data and detect anomalies in your cloud.
For example, AI can process thousands of API calls a second to pinpoint unusual API calls in your environment and quickly alert you of suspicious action in your environment. Using AI in this way can save your organization the time that teams would spend manually triaging different events. It enables you to detect — and respond to — threats faster. You can also leverage AI to make data classification more efficient. Generative AI tools are already trained to on many different data types, and your organization can use GenAI to easily detect sensitive data in your environment based on AI-powered classification.
Wiz’s goal is to make it easier for security teams to leverage AI, and that is why we are adding built-in AI-powered capabilities as part of the Wiz CNAPP. The new capabilities include AI-generated remediation and graph queries, helping organizations simplify security and accelerate incident response.
As a security leader, you might be concerned about the security implications of introducing AI into your environment. It is important to extend your existing cloud security measures to AI to protect your customer privacy and ensure you do not put your customers at risk. The Wiz Research team released this guide that you could follow to ensure you use Generative AI safely. If your organization is building with AI, Wiz launched Wiz for AI-SPM capabilities to help you protect your AI pipelines. Learn more about Wiz for AI Security, if prefer a live demo, we would love to connect with you.
