With data breaches on the rise in the financial services industry, generative AI offers a potential solution for a problem it helped create.
Data breaches in 2023 increased 72 percentage points from the previous record in 2021, according to the nonprofit security research firm Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC)’s 2023 Annual Data Breach Report. ITRC tracked 3,205 data compromises in 2023, up 78 percentage points year over year, and 72% compared to 2021’s 1,860 breaches.
Generative AI offers two useful approaches to improving cybersecurity, Matt Kraning, chief technology officer for threat management software platform Cortex at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, said during a panel discussion at the Nvidia GTC in San Jose, Calif., on March 19.
“First, a lot of this is using gen AI systems to predict how gen AI will be used by malicious researchers and get ahead of that by understanding techniques and what novel data we can generate and put into our machine learning systems,” he said. “Second, there’s a huge amount of data in cybersecurity and it’s unintuitive … so how do we create experiences that allow people to access, understand and interact with cybersecurity data?”
Financial institutions and service providers must be proactive in managing cybersecurity in the age of AI, Yan Zhai, senior director of Cyber Analytics and AI Innovation at Visa, said during the panel.
“For cybersecurity, it would be wonderful if companies would be able to generate these wonderful tools and we would just use it,” he said. “With cybersecurity, you need to be engaging AI from the get-go because it’s not just that we utilize AI to boost productivity, to improve time to react, to improve time to protect and to expand the protection bandwidth, but [it] also has to do with the inherent risk of AI.”
Safety, compliance issues remain
While financial institutions and service providers continue to develop use cases for AI, issues including safety and compliance remain, Tanneasha Gordon, principal of risk and financial advisory at Deloitte, said during the panel discussion.
“We know with generative AI that it poses a lot of opportunities from a monetary perspective, operational perspective and insights perspective,” she said. “We help our clients as they are building new product features, platforms, systems and AI agents to make sure that those things are being launched safely, securely, but also making sure it’s compliant.”
Government interventions such as President Joe Biden’s Oct. 30, 2023, executive order on AI and the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, signed March 13, add layers of compliance complexity for companies using AI as a cybersecurity tool as governments also look to minimize risk from individuals and foreign entities, Gordon said.
“There are not just individual bad actors, but [bad] nation-states as well, so what does that mean in terms of protecting your critical infrastructure and national security,” she said. “When it gets to that level, especially in [early] models, it gets scary, and that’s why we’re seeing more regulation and legislation.”
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