Trust and AI in cybersecurity: difficult but crucial to navigate (Alex Stamos, SentinelOne)

For this new episode of Techzine Talks on Tour we sat down with Alex Stamos during RSA Conference. Stamos is Chief Trust Officer at SentinelOne, and – among other things – also a Stanford professor and former Chief Security Officer of Facebook. We took a deep dive with him into the concept of trust.

Trust is a key component of our digital lives. It plays a role in our personal as well as in our business lives. Organizations need to know who they can trust before entering into a relationship with a vendor. At least, that’s how it should be. In practice, though, a lot of time is wasted on things like vendor risk management.

The existence of vendor risk management and its accompanying forms in itself isn’t a bad thing, according to Stamos. However, thinking that potential problems with some kind of product or system that is based upon tens or hundreds of millions of lines of code are going to be solved by someone filling out some kind of spreadsheet is far from realistic.

Know who to trust

One of the key questions we discuss during our conversation is how organizations can know who to trust. That’s a big question that deserves a substantial discussion. We go into the role a big player like Microsoft plays in this aspect. Should you let the company that builds Windows be responsible for your cybersecurity as well? And how can a cybersecurity company prove to their customers that they’re worthy of their trust? In other words, how do you provide enough transparency?

Another topic we discuss during this episode of Techzine Talks on Tour is how AI will impact the cybersecurity industry. Not only from a trust perspective, but also from an architectural and process perspective. Stamos is of the opinion that the world moves towards automated cybersecurity, thanks in large part to AI. This will give the defenders an advantage over the attackers, at least for a while. 

Automation will be crucial, because of the sheer amount of defending organizations need to do. This also implies, according to Stamos, that the industry as a whole will have to move towards a centrally orchestrated way of gathering and analyzing data. Only then will it be possible for organizations to properly defend themselves. There’s obviously a self-serving component to this statement, but we think fundamentally Stamos isn’t wrong. It’s a good concept to discuss, that’s for sure. 

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks on Tour now!

About Techzine Talks on Tour

Techzine Talks on Tour is a podcast series that Coen and Sander record while attending events all over the world. A spin-off of the successful Dutch series Techzine Talks, this new English series aims to reach new audiences. The goal is to publish a fresh episode at least every two weeks, with an increase in frequency around specific larger events with more recordings.

Techzine Talks on Tour covers a huge range of topics, as Coen and Sander attend a total of 50 to 60 events each year. Events ranging from open-source affairs like KubeCon to conferences hosted by Cisco, IBM, Salesforce and ServiceNow, to name only a few. With a lot of experience in many walks of IT life, Coen and Sander always manage to produce an engaging, in-depth discussion on general trends, but also on the underlying technology itself.

So follow Techzine Talks on Tour and stay in the know. We might just tell you a thing or two you didn’t know yet, but which might be very important for your next project or for your organization in general.

Where to find Techzine Talks on Tour?

The link in this story is from Spotify. However, Techzine Talks on Tour is available on all the well-known platforms. So you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and YouTube for example. Just search for Techzine Talks on Tour in your favorite podcast app.

Get in touch

We hope you like this new podcast series. If so, please let us know. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, we would like to hear those too. We’re also open to suggestions around specific topics, or specific people that want to appear in an episode of Techzine Talks on Tour.

Also read: SentinelOne promotes Purple AI from security assistant to autonomous SOC analyst