Insight announcements Insight MXDR Extends AI’s Critical Role in Cybersecurity
By Carmen Taglienti / 14 May 2024
If there’s one thing everyone can agree on when it comes to AI, it has incredibly disruptive capabilities.
On its own, that’s an undeniably good thing. Companies strive to discover the next big disruptive innovation to help their business — and oftentimes, the greater good — chart new courses forward. But when bad actors get involved, it’s a different story, especially in cybersecurity.
That’s why Insight has recently introduced a unique Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR) security service that combines the expertise of human intervention with the nonstop vigilance of AI.
Destructive vs. disruptive innovations
AI is about proactivity, and it evolves as threats do. More than anything else, AI is transformative, and those who embrace the change will be the ones who can protect themselves — and grow — the most effectively.
As part of Google’s Digital Futures Project, a global Ipsos survey of 17,000 respondents indicated that security is the second most important area for AI advancement in society (42%), just behind medicine (45%) and above climate change (37%) and research and development (36%). Most workers (51%) also believe AI will have a positive impact on their jobs five years from now.
Similarly, in a recent survey conducted by Insight in partnership with The Harris Poll, 75% of employees believe AI-powered devices are key to their companies staying competitive.
Generative AI is a perfect example. Widely heralded among the most disruptive innovations for its ability to enhance productivity, it also can be destructive in the wrong hands. Hackers can leverage gen AI for their own gains to trick people into sharing access into their systems, perpetrate attacks on essential infrastructure, facilitate data breaches and even turn proprietary models against their owners.
So, how do we avoid this? It might be a cliché, but it’s to fight fire with fire. AI can combat those same threats. In particular, gen AI can help protect organizations through tools like Microsoft Copilot for Security.
The AI-powered assistant can:
Generate actionable insights when investigating incidents.
Create instantaneous reports and presentations to spread awareness.
Answer direct questions regarding incidents or vulnerabilities.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
How Managed XDR helps
One vital area that AI can be used to improve an organization’s level of cybersecurity is MXDR, which can provide around-the-clock watchfulness beyond what humans can oversee on their own.
AI contributes to the effectiveness of MXDR in so many ways. It detects threats in real time by expediently sifting through an incredible amount of endpoint, network and cloud-based data that is simply too much to manually analyze. In the process, it reduces false positives by referring to historical data, empowering human analysts to focus on actual threats. It flags potential security incidents when users and/or devices deviate from their baseline behaviors.
That’s the detection angle. From a response perspective, AI isolates compromised endpoints and blocks traffic from suspicious sources. On top of that, AI empowers XDR solutions to adapt as threats evolve, which cannot be overstated in terms of its importance.
The “managed” aspect of XDR is where human intuition helps make sense of AI’s hyper-vigilance. Insight MXDR security service delivers 24/7/365 monitoring and threat detection for digital assets across the enterprise. Adding to the power of AI and automation, Insight’s team of 1,500+ dedicated Microsoft architects, engineers and security analysts detect threats before they escalate, enabling clients’ IT teams to devote their time to higher-value tasks.
I’m proud to say our solution has met Microsoft’s rigorous standards by achieving the rare distinction of Microsoft-verified MXDR solution status. Integrating AI into enterprise security is the only way to deliver advanced solutions that not only enhance our clients’ security posture and resilience but also help drive growth.
The best defense? A good offense
When you consider just how far organizations are looking to apply AI to the remediation of cybersecurity issues and to protect from future threats, malicious players are just as rigorously working to use it against us. Tech’s evil twin may always be a half-step ahead because AI serves the most creative people, and when bad actors don’t have to comply with the rules, they are likely to get there the quickest.
In this sense, the attacker has an advantage over the people who are defending a defined entity with relatively known attributes. It’s harder to defend against what you don’t know, but you can definitely attack in clever ways that people haven’t thought of before — and generative AI opens the door to all kinds of possibilities. Since the emergence of ChatGPT, phishing emails have risen 1,265%.
Advancements in AI will undeniably lead to more sophisticated, targeted attacks. In terms of cybersecurity, implementing Zero Trust and principles of least privilege can protect against any type of attack, whether AI-generated or not.
We are working diligently at Insight to develop the tools that help our clients take advantage of AI rather than feel vulnerable to it.
Carm Taglienti
Chief Data Officer and Distinguished Engineer
Carmen has more than 25 years of experience as a cloud computing, data science, data analytics and data management expert. As a principal cloud and AI architect for Insight, he focuses on cloud-based business solutions across multiple industries and technical domains. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Professional Studies teaching graduate courses in data science, cloud computing and analytics. Carmen is a published author and speaks at industry and technology events.
