Prioritizing security with the help of AI

In today’s AI-driven world, as personal data is utilized on an unprecedented scale, safeguarding privacy has become increasingly vital. Technological advancements have also amplified the sophistication of cyber threats and data misuse, resulting in greater risks of breaches and the mishandling of sensitive information. Data has become a prime target for cybercriminals.

VARINDIA spoke to Saket Modi, CEO - Safe Security, as he discusses how important it has become to safeguard data in an AI-driven world, and how Safe Security enhances protection of its customers worldwide with its revolutionary product -

Can you share your story from New Delhi to New York?
I started this company when I was in college, and it's been over a decade that we have been running this business. For six years, we were a services company when we were doing vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing. When the BHIM application was launched, we were responsible for providing its end to end security. We did security for a lot of large companies. So in a nutshell, for six years from 2012 to 2018, we had been doing services.

We were growing pretty fast, but we however realized that it is not a scalable business. The impact that we could make would be exponentially higher if we built a product company from a scratch. So with the idea of building a product company, we pivoted this company in 2018. That is when John Chambers got involved to make our vision a reality. I moved to the US in 2019 and it has been five years since we have been selling the product. We have been very fortunate to have grown 100 % year over year and today we are one of the hottest cyber security companies in the world.

How can we mitigate misinformation and bias in AI-driven data transactions?
AI is more like an augmentation of your intelligence. It is not a tool by itself, but AI is an amplification of whether you want to do good or you want to do bad. When bad people and hackers with some bad intentions use AI, the result becomes very deadly. That is the reason in order to counter that, you need to fight fire with fire. A couple of weeks back, we launched our GenAI agent, called SAFE X, a mobile application that anybody can download. So this is how we actually started in terms of trying to see how we can embed AI into our products. I would go to the extent of saying that any cyber security product that you deal with today, if they don't have AI in it, you should question why that product is there in the market in the first place. So any threats from AI have to be countered with AI.

How does your AI and Machine Learning platform assess cybersecurity health?
Safe Security tries to go ahead and provide the cybersecurity posture for companies, and try to look into a company’s maturity in terms of cybersecurity resilience, both before and after a breach. Some of the biggest names that you can think of in the world - Google, Facebook, Netflix, Chevron, Victoria’s Secret, KFC, Novartis, GSK, British Telecom - are all our customers. So while serving these large clients, we actually take all of their internal telemetry and integrate them with almost over 100 API from companies like Tenable, Rapid7, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, CrowdStrike. Once we put the telemetry together, we then go ahead to add the external threat intelligence by identifying the kind of external threats that are active. We then combine the internal security system along with the external threat landscape and then add the business context on top of it. We put all the data in the neural network and then allow you to query that using Gen AI (with the help of an app that we launched SAFE X). So we try to counter the hacks by using AI.

How does SAFE X utilize data-driven insights to enhance cybersecurity solutions?
SAFE X is like a Gen AI wrapper, which not only goes ahead and shows you things, but also does things. It is Gen AI for cyber security.  Through this you can get access to information in a very natural language, which was very difficult in the past. So you can now go into your mobile app and using voice, you can simply click a button and ask any security related question. You need to simply click a button and ask in English, and SAFE X will give you the answer based on your telemetry because remember, we take inputs from all your security products. Think of us as a layer on top of all your existing cyber security products which are out there, and we put all of that together and then give you the insights in a very simple way. That is how SAFE X is able to apply insights. And because it is an AI agent, it allows you to do things. So if you want to add a new third party or add a risk scenario, the mobile app will do that work for you. 

Why is cybersecurity a strategic business risk for non-technical executives?
In today's day and age, where businesses are dependent on technology, if they get hacked then businesses stop. And if any business stops, then it becomes a common problem for any leader of that business, whether it's the CEO or the CFO or any board member. That is precisely the reason why it is so important to go ahead and talk about cybersecurity risk in a non-technical way. So rather than just saying - Oh, we have so many vulnerabilities, the better way to communicate to a CEO or a CFO or to the board is to talk about the top risks like ransomware. For instance, saying things like our probability of ransomware in our environment is 23% while the industry average is 15%, or if a ransomware incident does occur, we can anticipate a $50 million impact. The moment you say this, it becomes a very simple thing to understand, which non-technical people can easily understand and then make decisions based on that.

How can we balance innovation and privacy in the age of AI?
The aviation industry became popular and commercialized only when safety became non-negotiable. In the same way, true embracing of digital will only happen when cybersecurity becomes a reality. There are some very fundamental problems, because most people are not even digitally literate. While digital literacy is going up, nobody is taught how to use the internet in the right way, or to use a mobile phone in the right way. And that is the reason, unfortunately, hackers, fraudsters, are able to take the advantage of so many people and therefore just get things done in an unfortunate way. With the AI revolution, there will be a way more sophistication and the frequency of the attacks will go up. So safeguarding everything using AI within cybersecurity is going to be the absolute fundamental requirement for a safer digital future.