Enhancing Cyber Resilience: Leveraging AI and External Service Providers

As an industry, we are short on resources, and the resources we have are burning out. What do we do? Simple: eliminate as many threats as possible before they reach the enterprise and provide automation to reduce the burden on our cybersecurity staff and infrastructure.

External Service Providers (ESPs) are incredibly useful in preventing malicious actions from reaching our enterprise and helping the staff identify where to focus, while also providing a set of tools with the data to investigate and remediate.

In February 2024, AT&T Business launched the first comprehensive network with built-in security controls that help with both prevention and remediation. One-third of the Internet’s traffic traverses the AT&T network daily. Sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI), decades of experience, and learnings from its customers enable AT&T to better identify malicious actions and act accordingly.

Let us walk through the business conversation about cyber resilience: The risk of staff shortages, the unique needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and what you can do to strengthen your security posture.

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Cyber Resilience is Now a Business Conversation

Now that most revenue is digital and assets are intangible (e.g., data, Intellectual Property (IP), applications), those assets can be threatened from anywhere in the world, anytime. Enterprises are on the cyber battlefield 24/7.

In the past, we could treat cybersecurity as a technology problem that is best handled with technical defenses. Because of the historically smaller volume of cyber threats, we could focus heavily on prevention, treating the rest as a cost of doing business.

That is no longer the case. Every day, we hear of another cyber incident, and the cost of those incidents is climbing. Our defenses must now include technology, people, process, and organization. We can no longer treat cyber incidents as a cost of doing business. Our cyber plans must cover the entire gamut of prevention, detection, and recovery. We must focus on being resilient.

The industry is moving towards resilience—the ability to operate amidst adversity. We look towards preventing as much as possible, faster detection of what does get through, and recovering more quickly. This all requires collaboration among technology, people, processes, and organizations.

In short, technology is not only about defense. Technology is also about automating as much as practical to prevent burning out the staff.

The industry is short on skilled resources and burning out.

READ MORE: Solve Staff Hiring and Retention Issues—The Cybersecurity Comp Report is Live!

In November 2023, Statista Research Department estimated we have 755,743 unfilled cyber positions in the United States. Other reports claim the number is much higher, while some reports show the actual number is lower. Regardless of the exact number, each report shows that we have insufficient resources to cover demand.

There is evidence that the increased demand and the shortage of qualified resources are causing severe ramifications for enterprises, in their security posture and even in the physical health of overworked staff.

Cyber security staff are reporting adverse physical effects of stress: 52% are reporting issues with anxiety (or depression), and 46% struggling with sleep issues.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of cyber security professionals admit burnout contributed to misconfigurations that resulted in security breaches. Misconfigurations and human error are always on the list of top root causes of cyber incidents. In the most recent X-Force report, 30% of exploited vulnerabilities are misconfigurations.

Security professionals have long regarded human error as a primary cause of (or at least a contributor to) incidents. Stanford researchers found human error caused 88% of cyber incidents.[6] While specific numbers are not available for the percentage of incidents caused by human error by cyber professionals, all indicators show that it is growing.

Incidents will continue to increase in the years it will take to solve these staffing shortages. In the near term, it is likely that we will see a sharp increase in incidents from the adversarial use of AI to create more adversarial campaigns with greater effectiveness, at higher volumes, at a lower cost to build, with an ability for the malicious actors to exploit faster. In 2023, X-Force found that AI and GPT were mentioned in more than 800,000 illicit and dark web forum posts that year. While specific numbers are not available for the percentage of incidents caused by human error by cyber professionals, all indicators show that it is growing.

Incidents will continue to increase in the years it will take to solve these staffing shortages. In the near term, it is likely that we will see a sharp increase in incidents from the adversarial use of AI to create more adversarial campaigns with greater effectiveness, at higher volumes, at a lower cost to build, with an ability for the malicious actors to exploit faster.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have the greatest need.

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SMBs rely more on ESPs and are more susceptible to cyber risk. SMBs have less free cash flow to invest in cyber. Their teams are smaller, thereby limiting the breadth of cyber skills. Let's face it: an SMB's strength is in its craft and its ability to innovate. SMBs do not lead with their heft or their security acumen. These factors make them more dependent on ESPs for their IT, safety, and security.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) reports 50% of SMBs have been the victims of at least one cyber-attack, with more than 60% of those attacked going out of business.

SMBs clearly have the greatest need to choose their ESP wisely. What to do? The answer is simple: reduce the volume and make the existing staff more productive. But how? The best way to reduce the volume is to stop malicious actions from getting to your enterprise. The key to making your staff more productive is to help them know where to focus while providing them with the tools to be more effective.

READ MORE: Boost Leadership & Staff Hiring—Adopt an Effective Cyber Hiring Strategy

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