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VentureBeat’s exclusive interview with Sam Evans, CISO of Clearwater Analytics, reveals why enterprise browsers are quickly becoming the frontline defense against shadow AI in its many forms.
Evans faced a critical challenge in October 2023. Standing before Clearwater Analytics’ board, he had to confront concerns that employees might inadvertently expose data that could potentially compromise the firm’s $8.8 trillion assets under management.
“The worst possible thing would be one of our employees taking customer data and putting it into an AI engine that we don’t manage,” Evans told VentureBeat. “The employee not knowing any different or trying to solve a problem for a customer…that data helps train the model.”
Here is our conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity
VentureBeat: How do you see AI shaping cybersecurity today?
Evans: The attacks have become significantly more sophisticated. If you consider it from the perspective of a bad actor, the phishing emails and attempts we receive have become much more complex. However, AI also possesses response capabilities.
I like to explain it to our board, as the ultimate cat-and-mouse game. As bad actors start to use AI to advance phishing, or perhaps expedite the time it takes for exploits to emerge after vulnerabilities are announced, there’s the opposite side of security practitioners using AI to help advance how we respond.
VentureBeat: How is AI helping your defensive capabilities?
Evans: We’ve begun integrating AI into our security playbooks. By doing so, our security analysts now spend less time searching and hunting. The AI is involved in the security operations center (SOC) product, conducting its initial triage analysis and saying, “Based on previous things that we’ve seen and things in my model, this is where I’d like to guide you.”
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