Generative AI & Cybersecurity

Preparing your Generative AI and cybersecurity

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is constantly evolving and provides compelling use cases for business today. Leaders should prepare their cybersecurity workforce to face the challenges from the introduction of GenAI to the enterprise and the cybersecurity function’s own processes. Building a skills-based organization (SBO)1 where cybersecurity leaders prioritize building the right skills can help address the challenges GenAI poses. CISOs (chief information security officers) of leading cyber SBOs focus on five skill themes anchored on how GenAI can enhance security’s ability to work faster and better: automate, augment, extend, create, and endure.

To enable GenAI for the cybersecurity workforce, CISOs and cybersecurity leaders should understand how GenAI can automate manual work. GenAI also provides direct support to augment humans by improving productivity and workforce experience. Furthermore, GenAI can extend human capabilities—performing activities that humans are unable to perform or scale due to the negative relationship between work effort and return on investment. GenAI also helps humans create—enabling the development of new skills. Finally, cybersecurity leaders should be aware of certain human capabilities and skills that will endure regardless of the shifting technology.

Automate

GenAI will usher in a significant operational transformation enabling humans to work smarter.2 GenAI tools are revolutionizing cybersecurity teams operations through automation. These are the initial considerations for a security leader:

• Current roles and requirements, especially in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), will likely shift as security removes manual and time-consuming processes and activities.
• Risk management teams will seek to support safe and compliant automated risk assessments.
• Governance, risk, and compliance teams will automate compliance reviews and policy orchestration to improve mapping of current policies, standards, and procedures against standard industry and regulatory frameworks.
• Compliance officers will develop trainings for internal compliance policies.
• Vulnerability management teams will automate testing and automatically develop supporting control documentation based on test results.
• Incident response teams can triage alerts, correlate events, and guide incident handlers through GenAI capabilities.

As cybersecurity leaders further explore how automation with GenAI can unlock more efficiencies, they should help ensure that the workforce skills measure up to emerging technologies.

Augment

Cyber professionals can produce efficient and reliable results using GenAI—augmenting practitioners’ ability and freeing up capacity to address more pressing issues. Security leaders can better position their workforce to take advantage as follows:

• Security talent will likely need to understand use cases and applications of conversational AI to better provide security for the data stored, accessed, and archived by applications leveraging chatbots.
• Practitioners can anticipate to analyze, process, and manage data through GenAI.
• The security workforce should understand effectiveness of prompt inputs and engineering using GenAI.

Extend

Many professionals are being asked to deliver on high-priority, operational activities and lack time to focus on strategic asks. GenAI can extend human capabilities—giving leaders and practitioners the ability to dedicate more time to strategic priorities as follows:

• Security leaders should understand machine learning (ML), language learning models3 (LLM), natural language processing (NLP), and prompt engineering as these will likely become standard capabilities.
• Quicker risk scoring, better risk prioritization, and more preventive measures may occur through integration of GenAI into existing processes.
• Third-party risk review processes, such as analyzing data in vendor-submitted and external documentation, can become easier with GenAI.
• Threat correlation and detection processes can be enhanced by GenAI.
• GenAI-enabled phishing detection can help improve the ability to detect threats and/or phishing attempts created by LLMs.

Create

GenAI can enable humans to design, build, test, deploy, monitor, and maintain work faster. Cybersecurity leaders can enable their workforce to create new content by contemplating the following:

• Risk reporting and executive briefing materials can be created quickly and with actionable and precise threat intelligence.
• Incident response teams can develop detailed playbooks to guide security analysts during remediation and recovery activities.
• Cyber communications teams can use GenAI’s capabilities for graphic design and presentation accelerators.
• Code generated from software developers can incorporate security requirements as GenAI recommends amendments before testing.
• Widespread security and awareness training on Generative AI safety, ethics and compliance, bias detection and mitigation, AI governance and security controls, and AI privacy limitations can be developed, delivered, and tracked for compliance, privacy, and ethics surrounding GenAI usage.

Endure

GenAI cannot replicate certain people skills. GenAI tools can produce misleading information and include a tendency to “hallucinate.” As a result, human capabilities will endure given that GenAI cannot reproduce certain skills inherent to humans, especially when making decisions that require nuanced judgment, ethical considerations, and creative problem-solving. Cybersecurity leaders can do the following to promote enduring human capabilities:

• Cybersecurity leaders must cultivate emotional intelligence to support the workforce effectively.
• Leaders should be prepared to interpret GenAI intelligence for effective decision-making.
• Security workforce can prioritize the use of empathy to support business customers.
• Leaders should promote critical thinking skills to avoid potentially harmful use of GenAI.
• Development of interpersonal skills, such as active listening and flexibility, among security practitioners will serve the business that expects to use GenAI more.

GenAI fails to share the human experience that understands the needs and concerns of stakeholders. Reinforcing these skills will help create synergies between GenAI and humans vital for an effective cybersecurity workforce.