AI Is Changing Cybersecurity Forever

I've been thinking a lot — [sighs] — over this past 1 year, particularly with all this layoff that's happening right now in the industry. And many of this reinvestment going back into AI infrastructure. Towards the end of this video, I have very important concluding thoughts that is something I have shared more than half a year ago on this channel, too. And I want to double down on that, triple down that, quadruple on that. I know it sounds a little dramatic, but it is what we need to do. It is what has to be done. You have seen the news, right? That all this are affecting us, affecting the tech workers, cybersecurity engineers, everything that you can possibly think of. And no, my advice is not for you to become a black hat hacker or a ransomware gang leader or even a command and control botnet operator. It's beyond that. It is to use AI. AI to become the ultimate hacker. Okay, just kidding. That's a tie. But in a more serious note, I've been working with many enterprises and organizations, and one thing is clear, AI is here to stay. It is here for two key reasons. The first reason is to either use AI to make more money for the company or to help the company save more money. Okay? That's really simple and straightforward. And what I shared a long time back was about how our roles are transitioning from your typical manual task-based operator into a manager of AI agents. And I want you to think about that really hard. If you have not been building AI agents, you need to do that. If you're not been orchestrating multiple AI agents and develop that as a skill. Develop that something deep in your repertoire. You have to do that because when I've been talking to the all these different enterprises, organizations, there is still budget and the budget is going more and more streaming into AI roles. How can we use AI to improve and automate on our work? How can we use AI to become more efficient than ever before? So, you'll be saying, "Hey, Mr. Hackaloy, could you give an example? " All right. So, you know me, right? I'm a security engineer in one of the fan companies and security operation center, all right, where you have all these security engineers looking at all the different security findings and analyzing them, triaging, investigating, looking at all these different log sources. That is being automated. It is being integrated with AI. So, instead of you spending 9 hours in a day trying to triage, trying to investigate, correlate across all these different log sources, what you do now in your role to be valuable in the market, to command a premium, is that you can introduce AI engines into this security operation center. So, you get the AI to pull all these log sources, you expose it to tools that it can use to query specifically down to the timestamps and so on. And then after which, you possibly have multiple of these AI engines running and one of those agents could help to interpret the results. And then possibly another agent developing the report. So, you're going from 9 hours for one security finding down to possibly 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most. So, you save the company so much more time, and time is money. The company then use those resources that's been saved, reallocate them back to other stuff. All right, and possibly to you, because you now command a premium because of your AI skills. You're able to deploy AI. You can operationalize AI. You can make the AI infrastructure more efficient. You get paid more. That is the market. That is where the market is going. And our example will be saying, okay, you want to send a phishing email. Maybe you're a black hat hacker. You are not typing emails anymore manually. You're going to all these different AI services, right? Gemini, Chat GPT, whatever. No one is sending phishing emails anymore. Typing them manually, because, come on, your English ain't that good. Just get AI to do it for you. It's faster. You probably get a higher click-through rate as a black hat hacker

sending phishing emails. All right. So, what this also means is that if you're the defender, the velocity of attacks are faster. Execution is being commoditized right now. So, if you're the good guy hacker, so, what you're seeing now, the attack campaigns are much faster from initial access. Let's say some kind of username, some kind of password got lost onto the internet. The hackers then use those exposed credentials, log into the organization, do lateral movement and stuff, and they pull all this information out of it. All of that, which used to take weeks or months, is now been compressed possibly into hours or minutes. So, that's mind-blowing, which means the good guy hackers, the defenders, have to build AI in response to AI attacks. There is no other ways around it. Tell me a better way. So, my final advice, which is the most important of all, is that output like application development, development of new services, building a website and all of that, is now cheaper and faster than ever before. There is no denial of that. Whichever AI coding assistant you're using, and so on. So, more applications, more services, more infrastructures are being developed. However, there is a big problem now. And for developed applications, they call it dark code. And then for developed infrastructures, they call it dark operations or dark IT. And then for security, likewise. All right, possibly, I don't know what's the name for it, dark findings. So, there are more telemetry, there are more logs, there are more information than ever before. But, here is the most important advice. There is a need, a very important need, for high technical judgment. And it's going to come at a bigger and bigger price for enterprises and organizations. So, meaning that as more of the services develop, all right, at like 10 times or 100 times the velocity than the traditional way of developing applications, the people who can sit down for a few days reading through every single configuration, every code, understanding the entire infrastructure, and knows exactly what is going on, they will get paid the most. They will command the highest salary, and that has to be you. So, when you sit down in the meeting, and you're the person who understand the inside out, the integration, the dependencies, how the applications are interacting with one another, the architecture, and you were the person who has sat down, not doom-scrolling, but really deeply understand what are the intricate details of everything. You are going to be the go-to person for all technical judgment. And what does it mean? It means that you can solve problems, you can fix problems. For example, the other day I was using AI for hacking. Sorry, I mean penetration testing. And the AI is capable of producing logs. Every single command is logged. Every single action by the AI agent are being placed into some kind of logging service. And I could look at the logs. I could read it because I spent so much time on the fundamentals, on the technical work, that when I look at the command, parameters, I look at the instruction, I say, "Okay, this one is not going to work. This one is a false positive. Oh, this one. This is a real vulnerability. " I could read through all of that. And you should, too. You need to spend more time getting the fundamentals right. Because the AI is going to speed everything up. Output is commoditized, but high technical judgment is going to be a premium. So, you have to be the premium. So, this is my update to you. I will see you on the other side. Take care. Bye-bye.