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Cybersecurity Interview

From Reaction to Prevention: Tenable’s Satnam Narang on the Future of Cybersecurity with GenAI

Cybersecurity practitioners have long grappled with the challenge of prevention, constantly striving to stay ahead of ever-evolving threats. However, for many security teams, reacting to incidents has become the daily norm, particularly in India, where 64% of teams are in a constant state of firefighting. In a recent study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tenable, it was found that 73% of organizations in India plan to adopt Generative AI (GenAI) within the next year to strengthen their security frameworks. Despite the momentum, only 8% of organizations express high confidence in implementing GenAI technologies effectively. The hesitation is rooted in concerns over technological maturity and the perception that GenAI may introduce new security risks.

In this interview, Satnam Narang, Senior Staff Research Engineer at Tenable, discusses how GenAI can act as a force multiplier for cybersecurity teams, helping bridge the skills gap while also serving as a key component in a preventive security strategy. He shares insights on navigating the risks and opportunities associated with GenAI adoption, Tenable’s proactive approach to cybersecurity, and the trends that will shape the industry’s future.

How do you envision GenAI evolving in the cybersecurity space? What are some key areas where it can enhance current security practices, particularly in threat detection and response?

Organizations are already leveraging GenAI Assistants to accelerate threat detection by answering critical questions such as, “What can you tell me about this asset?” and “Does this asset have any exploitable vulnerabilities?” These AI tools aggregate data, giving organizations visibility into complex attack paths while also offering clear explanations and remediation guidance. As GenAI technology continues to evolve, it will tackle even more complex challenges at a faster pace, helping organizations stay one step ahead of increasingly sophisticated threat actors.

With the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals, how do you see GenAI helping to bridge the skills gap?

GenAI serves as a powerful force multiplier, enhancing efficiency and productivity by swiftly processing, retrieving, and delivering vital information when it’s needed most. It streamlines complex processes, enabling security teams to operate with greater speed and precision. By cutting through complexity, GenAI empowers teams to work, search, and analyze more efficiently, enabling faster, more informed decision-making and significantly accelerating daily output.

For organizations looking to deploy GenAI within their security frameworks, what are the best practices to follow? How can security practitioners ensure smooth integration and avoid common pitfalls during implementation?

AI governance is a crucial step to take before adopting any AI solutions. Organizations should prioritize data policies and controls centered on security, privacy, governance, and compliance. Security practitioners must communicate to business leaders how transparency and accountability are critical to prevent bias, hallucinations, and other concerns while managing risk. It goes a long way in investing in the right GenAI tools for security.

Smooth integration of the technology requires a clear definition of goals and outcomes. For example, if the goal is to implement a preventive security strategy, then GenAI is best deployed in areas that often require a lot of time and effort, like threat hunting, and incident response. It can also be leveraged to identify patterns and anomalies faster, allowing security teams to identify new threat vectors before they disrupt the operations. Having a smooth integration strategy can make all the difference while adopting new technologies. It helps organizations avoid pitfalls and drive better ROI on security investments.

Many organizations in India express concerns that GenAI could increase security risks rather than mitigate them. How is Tenable addressing these concerns, and what measures are you implementing to ensure the safe and secure use of GenAI technologies?

According to Tenable Research, more than one-third of security teams are finding usage of AI applications in their environment that might not have been approved via formal processes. In fact, during a 75-day period between late June and early September, Tenable found over 9 million instances of AI applications on more than 1 million hosts. The cybersecurity risk of unapproved AI usage is compounded by the increasing volume of AI vulnerabilities.

To address this risk, Tenable announced the release of AI Aware, advanced detection capabilities designed to rapidly surface artificial intelligence solutions, vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Tenable AI Aware provides exposure insight into AI applications, libraries and plugins so organizations can confidently expose and close AI risk, without inhibiting business operations.

Prevention is a major goal for most security teams, yet many find themselves in reactive mode. What role do you see Tenable playing in helping organizations move from a reactive approach to a proactive and preventive cybersecurity strategy?

Implementing a robust exposure management program is the key to overcoming these hurdles, and Tenable is pioneering innovation in this space. Our exposure management platform — Tenable One — is enabling organizations to adopt a preventive security approach.

Tenable One empowers organizations to assess their vulnerabilities, prioritize remediation efforts, and streamline their cybersecurity operations. It unifies security visibility, insight, and action across the attack surface, arming organizations with the capacity to isolate and eliminate priority cyber exposures, be it from IT infrastructure, cloud environments, critical infrastructure or everywhere in between. It connects the dots between the risk relationships across siloed solutions, rapidly finding and fixing the priority exposures and reducing business risk. We are helping organizations go after threats proactively, and remediate them before they turn into full-blown attacks.

What key cybersecurity trends do you foresee shaping the industry in the next 12 months? How do you anticipate these trends impacting organizations, and how can they best prepare for them?

Any organisation that collects, maintains, and processes data regardless of its size or industry, is at risk of a breach if data is not secured properly. Securing the cloud environment does not automatically mean that sensitive data within the cloud is being properly protected or handled.Nearly four in 10 organizations globally are leaving themselves exposed at the highest levels due to the “toxic cloud triad” of publicly exposed, critically vulnerable and highly privileged cloud workloads. Each of these misalignments alone introduces risk to cloud data, but the combination of all three drastically elevates the likelihood of exposure access by cyber attackers.

Tenable provides an actionable cloud security platform that helps organizations isolate and eradicate cloud exposures at scale for public, private and hybrid cloud environments, across infrastructure, workloads, identities and data, including through AI insights into access, resources and datasets.

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