On the 23rd episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Matt Modica, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at BJC HealthCare. BJC HealthCare is one of the largest non-profit healthcare organizations in the United States, operating 14 hospitals across Missouri and Illinois. BJC has over 30,000 employees and over 4,200 doctors across its network. In this conversation, Matt discusses the unique challenges of securing patient privacy in a digital world, new opportunities and risks in healthcare with recent AI advancements, and aligning security practices with an AI-enabled future.

Quick hits from Matt:

On the increasing effectiveness of AI powered attacks: “Voice technology and mimicking a person got very good. Pretending to be somebody else and trying to get credential access or compromise credentials, it's not just executives anymore. It's anybody with a credential. So the credential is valuable and they're being sold. It's just a matter of how criminals can best get the ID and password to be able to sell.”

On critical areas where AI allows us to focus more attention: “We have time to do the things we've always talked about wanting to do. We've talked about wanting to do more threat hunting, about wanting to do more risk quantification. We've always talked about wanting to do a better job and be more proactive in shifting security left in our, in our agile environment, our workflows and things. So we have some time to do that now because we're making some of those things either automated or more efficient.”

On the maintained need for humans in the loop with enterprise AI: “ When you're running a large enterprise, uptime is of utmost importance. If I change a firewall rule that blocks something legitimate, I'm going to hear about that. If that was done because it was a low security risk, but the automation decided to do that, then there’s a lot of ramifications there. I don't know if we'll ever get to a hundred percent full automation. I think we're always going to have to have someone validating accuracy. And the models and making sure that our risk tolerance as an organization is taken into consideration as we instrument those things or allow those things to take action on our behalf.”

Book Recommendation: The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.

On the 22nd episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Joe Silva, former Chief Information Security Officer at Jones Lang LaSalle. JLL is a commercial real estate company operating in 84 countries worldwide. The company has over 100,000 employees, $20 billion dollars in annual revenue, and ranks #193 on the Fortune 500. Managing billions of square feet of property worldwide, JLL delivers a full suite of services, including — property management, leasing, capital markets, and real estate technology solutions. In this conversation, Joe dives into the realities versus the hype of AI in cybersecurity, AI’s role in shifting the balance between human judgment and automated systems, and AI’s potential to solve long-standing defender blind spots.

Quick hits from Joe:
On the new attack surface presented by AI: “If I look at how corporate functions at large enterprises, HR, finance, they were using RPAs (robotic process automations) to automate so much of this work, and now you look at AI agents as essentially hyper aware RPAs. It's a natural evolution. RPAs, which themselves created a massive attack surface and now we just start moving all of that to AI because we're completely taking the human out of the loop.”

On the increasing negative impact of AI cyberthreats: “Criminals can leverage AI to create highly bespoke and tailored fraud to individuals whose identities they can stitch together across multiple data sets. Organizations will start feeling the impact of AI abetting criminal activity, and that will raise the consequences.”

On areas that AI is moving the needle: “Gen AI is making it a lot easier for providers to make more information accessible and provide more context in tools…Where we see Gen AI being helpful is the ability to train machine learning models, and actually get more utility out of machine learning. We've been hearing ML and AI for the last 10 years as buzzwords associated with products and the utility of ML has improved due to AI.”

Book Recommendation: Five Years to Freedom by James N. Rowe

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.

On the 21st episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Tony Taylor, Chief Information Security Officer at Land O'Lakes. Land O'Lakes is an American member-owned agricultural cooperative. The co-op has 9,000 employees who process and distribute products for about 300,000 agricultural producers. Land O Lakes handles 12 billion pounds of milk annually and is one of the largest producers of butter and cheese in the United States. In this conversation, Tony shares his thoughts on AI transforming the cyber threat landscape, the paradox of AI empowering defenders while enabling attackers, and strategies for cyber defense in an AI-driven world.

Quick hits from Tony:

On the oversaturation of AI as a marketing term: “You can’t talk to a vendor today where they don’t talk about their AI. Everybody’s got an AI engine. For me as a consumer of that technology, I go, well, show me how that AI works.”

On how AI can help address the talent shortage in cybersecurity: “We need to be able to bring in less mature or less experienced people and let them build that experience because the workforce isn’t there. I can’t go hire senior engineers all over the place because they’re not available.”

On AI elevating the nature of work in cybersecurity: “AI will reduce workload, and I think it’s going to reduce the workload that nobody wants to do anyway...It’s going to allow people to work at a higher level.”

Podcast Recommendation: SANS Stormcast by Johannes B. Ullrich

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.