Earlier this month, I was thrilled to join forces with the team at Dark Reading for a webinar on the future of AI in security operations. Titled CISO Perspectives: How to make AI an accelerator, not a blocker, the webinar allowed me to take a deep dive into the future role of AI in security with some of the most knowledgeable CISOs on the subject, Mandy Andress of Elastic and Matt Hillary of Drata.

Aner Izraeli is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Torq. He leads Torq’s cybersecurity strategy with a focus on innovation and resilience. Aner’s career spans over two decades in the cybersecurity field, where he has consistently demonstrated expertise in SIEM/SOC, incident response, and network security.

In the summer of 2022, a few Twilio employees received an odd text message. Appearing to be from the internal IT department, these messages suggested employees need to reset expiring passwords through a specific URL. However, neither the URL or the message was legitimate, and the threat actors controlled the URL. They essentially tricked employees into giving away credentials, resulting in the compromise of over 130 connected organizations.

Endpoints are a continuous target for threat actors. They serve as gateways to the overall network, meaning an attack that starts on a single endpoint can quickly spread across the attack surface. They offer a valuable entry point into an organization’s environment that can be used to launch sophisticated cyber attacks.

A review of AI-generated malware, and how a SOC might deal with the ever-increasing threat… Theofanis Dimakis, SOC Officer, and Nikolaos Tsompanidis, Threat Detection & Response Expert at Obrela, speaking during the recent CRESTCon Europe event, shared insights from their perspective into detecting malware, including the rising tide of AI variants.

No one feels the pain of ransomware and other disruptive and costly digital cybersecurity attacks more than the people managing the day-to-day in your SOC (Security Operations Center). At 13 attacks every second in 2023, cybercriminals, fraudsters and nation-state hacktivists are overwhelming SOC analysts. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of SOC analysts report the size of the attack surface has increased. At the same time, CISOs and SOC managers are struggling to handle on-the-job analyst burnout and turnover.

SOAR is yet another set of cybersecurity tools and technologies that’s exciting to talk about, looks good on paper, but is fraught with financial difficulties for MSSPs seeking to deliver an outsourced security solution that maintains a healthy ROI.

Recent research by Arctic Wolf has revealed that, within the last 12 months, 48% of organizations identified evidence of a successful breach within their environment. As The State of Cybersecurity: 2024 Trends Report highlights, “To fully understand the gravity of this statistic, it is important to understand that, although 48% of these environments found evidence of a data breach, that does not inversely mean that 52% of organizations did not suffer a breach.”

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), desperate to automate repetitive tasks, initially turned to SOAR to reduce their workload and improve threat response times. Unfortunately, legacy SOAR tools still face scalability, flexibility, and integration challenges. As the complexity and volume of cyber threats continue to grow, the limitations of legacy SOAR have become more apparent, necessitating the move towards more advanced automation technologies like Torq Hyperautomation.