Fighting AI Threats With Behavior-Based Awareness Training

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized security awareness training by evolving from manual, synthetic and generalized campaigns to personalized, automated and relevant campaigns, said Evan Reiser, CEO of Abnormal AI, which rebranded from Abnormal Security in April to reflect its move to a broader AI-native security platform.

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Reiser said AI has made attacks more personal, scalable and realistic, enabling unskilled actors to launch sophisticated phishing and social engineering attempts. On the other hand, AI has unlocked personalized phishing training and behavioral anomaly detection that were too expensive or technically infeasible. And organizations can use AI to automate internal processes that reduce complexity and increase agility (see: From Email to Human Behavior: Abnormal Security’s Evolution).

“It allows more people to be criminals,” Reiser said. “It allows more of those criminals to send more attacks, and probably most scarily, those attacks are more sophisticated. AI can generate new ways of tricking people that we probably couldn’t imagine a couple years ago. So it’s about increasing the volume and the efficacy of different attacks.”

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Reiser also discussed:

• The U.S. government as a high-value, high-risk target;
• Tailoring protections to local norms and attack styles;
• Why AI boosts the feasibility of building capabilities in house.

Prior to co-founding Abnormal in 2018, Reiser led the product management and machine learning teams for the advertising business at Twitter. He has also co-founded several companies, including Bloomspot – acquired by JPMorgan Chase – and AdStack – acquired by TellApart. Reiser began his career at Eastman Kodak doing research and development in machine learning for intelligence applications.