Transcript
Andy Piazza (0:02)
You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.
David Moulton (0:14)
Welcome to Threat Vector, the Palo Alto Networks podcast where we discuss pressing cybersecurity threats and resilience and uncover insights into the latest industry trends. I'm your host, David Moulton, Senior Director of Thought leadership for unit 42.
Andy Piazza (0:27)
The stuff that you struggle with is the stuff that sticks with your brain. So if we're making everything easier, we're going to be less intelligent. Then there's also the argument is like, oh well, we can use AI to really. You're still going to need your experts. We're going to empower our experts. What happens in five or 10 years when we don't have any new experts getting promoted up and those guys are retiring out because we've replaced all of our juniors with AI? We're going to have a huge problem in the industry where we. We already have a huge staffing problem in the industry. It's hard to scale up all the things you need to know in cybersecurity. And now we're going to get rid of the very few junior jobs that we have and replace those with AI. We're going to be stuck in five to 10 years.
David Moulton (1:23)
Today I'm speaking with Andy Piazza, Senior Director of Threat intelligence at unit 42. Andy is a seasoned threat management professional with over two decades of experience spanning security operations, cyber threat intelligence and malware analysis. He's also known for his leadership roles at IBM X Force, besides Nova and the US army, and holds numerous certifications. You may know him as a DEFCON goon and a frequent speaker at Threat intel conferences across the country. Today we're going to talk about the.
Sam (1:52)
Good, the bad and the ugly of AI.
David Moulton (1:54)
How artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity from supercharging threat detection to enable new adversary tactics. Here's our conversation.
Sam (2:08)
Andy, welcome back to Threat Vector. You've been a goon at DEFCON and now are leading contests there. Plus, you've spent years on the front lines of cyber threat Intel. You've seen the culture and tech evolve in tandem. What's the biggest shift you've seen at the intersection of hacker culture and emerging tech like AI?
Andy Piazza (2:33)
Well, I think with hackers throughout our history, when emerging tech comes out, we're usually some of the first to adopt it. And by adopt it, I usually mean break it. But understanding that from a hacker perspective, we really enjoy just getting hands on things and understanding how they work at its core elements and then trying to see if we can make it do things it's not intended to do so. It's not always, you know, breaking things or hacking things to be malicious. But we ultimately just really want to have an understanding and a lot of us are on the good, good guide side of things. And so we want to understand how we can secure those things as well. You know, from a DEFCON perspective, we're seeing AI come out in a number of different fun contests like making music and making art, but also seeing the shift in culture of defcon where it was very much kind of the old guard and everybody's under their hacker handles and we are very anonymous when it comes to photos and stuff like that. This year we have a social media scavenger hunt where they're going to go do traditional scavenger hunt things that we've done for 30 plus years at Defcon. But part of their challenge, if they want to make points, is they've got to upload videos and snippets to social media. So I think it's cool to see how they're going to interact with social media. And a lot of them will use AI for kind of deep fake videos to really kind of modernize DEF CON this year. So it's cool to see that culture kind of shift as we bring younger blood into the community.
