The State of AI Cybersecurity

As a field, cybersecurity has always been fast-changing and intricately complex. This constant shape-shifting is what keeps things interesting for practitioners, who are consistently being challenged to learn something new. Over the last couple of years, however this already rapid pace of transformation has accelerated even further, with groundbreaking advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) rewriting the terms of contest between attackers and defenders. Today’s security leaders must build strategies to stay ahead of the curve so that defenses can evolve along with the sophistication of attacks.

We recently surveyed over 1,500 cybersecurity and IT professionals around the world to understand their attitudes about AI in cybersecurity. We asked how AI is impacting the threats they face, how they are responding, and what role they see AI playing in present-day and future prevention, threat detection, incident response, and recovery workflows.

This is the second year that we’ve conducted this research. We found that a growing number of CISOs now agree that the impacts of AI-powered threats on their organizations are significant. A very large majority (89%) believe that these threats will continue to bedevil their organizations well into the future. Hands-on practitioners are especially worried, with SecOps team members expressing higher levels of concern about the long-term impacts of AI than CISOs.