Locking your agency’s digital front door isn’t enough to keep it safe from potential cybersecurity threats. Cyber attackers are now using AI to help them make their entrance, making them sneakier, faster and more relentless than in the past. As AI proliferates, closing such common-sense cyber gaps becomes increasingly critical. Yet agencies suffer from persistent vulnerabilities that limit their risk reduction. They often have inadequate multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other zero-trust protocols and blind spots created by shadow IT, for example. Many agencies stitch together an ecosystem of tools with little coherence.

A single solution can’t solve these challenges, but you start by taking measurements. You might count the number of shadow IT devices on your network, for instance, and determine your attack detection and response times. The goal is to develop a balanced portfolio of reforms to answer the AI threat, said Fadi Fadhil, Field CIO of Palo Alto Networks.

“A core concept around AI is that bad actors use AI to multiply themselves, become more sophisticated and get faster at attacking us,” he said. “Yet, we’re constantly lagging a bit behind.”

In this video interview, Fadhil discusses why agencies struggle to meaningfully reduce their cyber risk and how to overcome those challenges. Topics include:  

• Specific questions to ask when endeavoring to boost cyber defenses
• Why MFA, segmentation and other protections are so critical
• How AI has impacted the cybersecurity environment