AI Will Make Us ‘Security Champions’: Check Point CEO
He also said that AI will enhance the jobs of cybersecurity professionals and not replace them.
An intriguing online discussion took place Wednesday featuring exeutives from security company Check Point including CEO and co-founder, Gil Shwed; Mark Ostrowski, Check Point’s head of engineering; and Frank Dickson, group vice president for IDC’s Security and Trust research practice.
The topic was AI’s impact on cybersecurity.
Dickson kicked off the conversation by addressing AI’s disruption in the security space.
“As we engage with GenAI, the reality is we're creating a lot of this, quote, unquote, productive risk, and that productive risk comes in this form of disruption. About seven in 10 organizations talk about the fact that they will be disrupted, either now or within 18 months in the future. And that's important to note for us in security because we're going to have to deal with this disruption,” he said during Check Point’s online webinar, entitled “Unveiling the Future of Network Security in the Era of AI.”
“What ... this disruption really means, it means complexity. Complexity is the enemy of security,” Dickson added. “I think a lot of the organizations are struggling with, what's the risk versus the benefit?”
Ostrowski cited a Gartner forecast that by 2026 over 80 percent of enterprises will be using generative AI. Shwed weighed in on the security implications for that predicted widespread adoption.
Shwed said AI poses “an interesting opportunity and an interesting challenge for cybersecurity.”
“Attacks will become far more sophisticated, but analysts can also become more sophisticated, because some of the analysts will be AI bots, and with the increase of attacks that we see every day, that's something that definitely happens today, an organization is attacked almost 900 times a week. It's a 75 percent increase just in the last year. These attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated, and by now, we already see attacks that are created by AI and not attacks that are created by human beings. We need to be ready, and we need to use AI on our side as well,” Shwed said.
“The hackers are using AI; we will be using even much better than them. And I think part of it is not just to automate the processes that we're used to doing ... but actually take AI and do our job,” he added.
However, Shwed also reassured cybersecurity professionals that their jobs are not threatened by AI.
“Don't be afraid. I think if you're a security administrator and analyst, [AI is] actually a good thing,” he said.
“Many of the routine tasks that we cannot do, 24/7, analyzing our logs, asking questions, will be done by AI. And even think about it a little bit more philosophically, when we look at the opportunity of AI, it's not just to replace the routine processes that we do and make them simpler and easier for us. It's actually just like when somebody asks us, please add this user to the system. It's not add this IP address with these services, but please allow [this user] the access that he needs that the AI will be able to do just that, and the AI will ask us back, OK, who's [that user], or find out by itself, and what does [that user] need to do, and what's the best security practice? AI will make us real champions as security professionals in advancing the state of connectivity and the state of security,” Shwed said.