Cybersecurity vendors enter their AI brain era
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Trend Micro, a major cybersecurity vendor, has been quietly rolling out a new "AI brain" that gives customers the ability to automate their threat defenses.
Why it matters: For years, cybersecurity vendors have promised that AI-enabled tools would one day help companies predict attacks and automatically patch new security flaws.
- That day is now here.
The big picture: Most successful cyberattacks continue to target human error, such as not patching a security flaw quickly enough or failing to detect hackers posing as legitimate employees as they exfiltrate hundreds of files.
Between the lines: Most security teams are burnt out and overburdened with hundreds of notifications each day detailing new threats to their online systems.
- The AI brain powers so-called AI agents that Trend Micro's customers can use to automate both the evaluation of those notifications and the response to them.
Zoom in: Trend Micro started embedding its AI brain into its security suite in October, Rachel Jin, the company's chief enterprise platform officer, told Axios.
- The brain has read every cybersecurity industry book that's been published, digested the company's more than 35 years of blogs and internal documents about cyber defense, and trained on its global threat research.
- Trend Micro customers have the ability to decide what proprietary data its AI tools can access — which helps resolve many of the privacy concerns businesses have raised about bringing AI-powered tools into their tech stacks.
The intrigue: The AI brain is what powers Trend Micro's new autonomous cybersecurity agent, which completes tasks for users without much, if any, prompting.
- While Trend Micro's previous iteration of its chatbot filled an assistant role, the new tools act more like an adviser or even "a commander" who can predict attacks and evaluate risks of oncoming security threats, Jin said.
Trend Micro sees a few use cases for the new brain:
- It can hold onto institutional knowledge about attacks and weak points that might get lost whenever employees leave their roles.
- Autonomous agents can update data storage protocols as new privacy laws go into effect.
- Trend Micro claims the new brain can take proactive actions to protect companies from known ransomware threats, which typically exploit publicized notifications.
Yes, but: Most customers appear to still be using the tools mostly as an assistant that helps them prioritize their workflows.
- Trend Micro is betting that customers will quickly start building trust with the tools to let them carry out basic patches and similar tasks.
- "It's evolving," Jin said. "Probably not every company will go to 100% automation, but it will be closer and closer to autonomous."
Zoom out: Trend Micro is one of the first companies to roll out a cybersecurity AI agent to customers — and it surely won't be the last.
- As more cybersecurity vendors roll out their own autonomous tools, the differentiator will be the training data: What threat intelligence do they have to offer? And how well can they predict malicious hackers' next moves?
- "The key competition is knowledge competition, skill-set competition and threat intelligence competition," Jin said.
What's next: Trend Micro is exploring creating an AI-focused product package that would give customers access to a "more advanced workflow" and offset increased cloud computing costs.
- But for now, the company sees these AI enhancements as a competitive advantage that should be available to every customer, Jin said.
