Google Recruits Allies to Apply Generative AI to Cybersecurity – Source: securityboulevard.com

At the Google Cloud Security Summit, Google today announced that Broadcom, Crowdstrike, Egnyte, Exabeam, F5, Fortinet, Netskope, Securiti, SentinelOne, Sysdig, Tenable and Thales have all committed to using generative artificial intelligence AI capabilities from Google within their cybersecurity platforms.

Last month, Google launched a Google Cloud Security AI Workbench, an extensible large language model (LLM) designed specifically for cybersecurity use cases.

Sunil Potti, general manager and vice president of cloud security for Google Cloud, said that approach makes it possible for cybersecurity vendors to take advantage of generative AI without having to share data will a general-purpose LLM like ChatGPT that makes all the data it collects available to any user as it updates its LLMs.

At the same time, Google added a slew of additional cloud security capabilities, including a Chronicle threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) service that automates the ingestion of telemetry data with a single click. That data is then correlated with data that Google collects on its own to detect threats and ultimately create custom playbooks for responding to cybersecurity incidents.

In addition, Google is adding attack path simulation capabilities to the premium edition of its Security Command Center service. Forthcoming enhancements will use Security AI Workbench to translate complex attack graphs to human-readable explanations of attack exposure, including impacted assets and recommended mitigations.

There is also now a reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention service to protect payment transactions by identifying targeted manual attacks and large-scale fraud attempts. It automatically trains fraud models based on behavior and transaction data to identify events that are likely fraudulent.

Google is also adding a Secure Web Proxy service to help monitor and secure egress web traffic by applying more granular policies without having to configure virtual machines and is previewing enhancements to securing application programming interfaces (APIs) using machine learning models that have been embedded with its Apigee API management platform.

Finally, Google is making available in open beta Passkeys, a capability that enables users to sign in with a fingerprint, face recognition or other screen-lock mechanism.

Potti said Google is launching additional cybersecurity services in part to make up for the ongoing shortage of cybersecurity talent. Organizations will be able to leverage a wide range of automated capabilities enabled by various AI technologies to better secure IT environments, he added.

Most organizations are still struggling with mastering all the nuances of cloud security. As more workloads are deployed in the cloud, it has become apparent that legacy approaches to securing application workloads at scale are not as effective. The challenge organizations encounter today is not so much a lack of tools as much as it is the processes and skills required to secure cloud workloads. It’s not clear to what degree AI will enable organizations to make up for their current lack of cloud security expertise, but in the absence of a large pool of available cloud security professionals, the only remaining option is reliance on AI.