Hi everyone and welcome. Thanks for joining our session on what changes when Anthropic enters the cyber game. I'm Ron Pallet, co-founder and of Solo Security, and I'm really glad to be here with Rinky Sethi, CISO at Upwind Security. Quick note, given the situation in the Middle East and repeated sirens in this area, we chose to pre-record the session and make sure that the conversation could run smoothly without interruptions. So without further ado, this conversation feels pretty timely for now because Anthropic officially announced stepping into the cybersecurity arena, positioning Claude not as just a general AI assistant as magical as it is, but something that can help security teams identify and fix vulnerabilities in code. And that's a meaningful shift for us in this industry. And for a long time AI has been something security teams had been experimenting with on the side, but it looks like this is going to change things for how security teams actually operate. And Rinky as the CISO of Upwind is also a four-time CISO who has led security at companies like Twitter, Rubrik, Bill, and built security programs at global scale across Fortune 500 environments including companies like IBM, Walmart, eBay, which is super super impressive. The rare combination I think of executive leadership and hands-on product security experience with that track record of building security teams is not something that you find every day. So I'm really happy to have you here with us Rinky. I think if you follow Rinky on social media you probably know that she talks a lot about context and trust and resiliency and what actually matters in production, and that's exactly where this conversation matters because companies like Anthropic entering the conversation, it's not just how but what new tools appear, do we get more clarity or just more noise? Do we make any better decision going forward or are we going to have a faster decision? So we have a lot to speak about and we are going to unpack that with Rinky hopefully. So thank you for joining us, Rinky. How are you?
I'm doing good. Thank you for the kind intro, Ron, and I appreciate the resilience on your end too and being flexible in recording this.
Thank you so much. You just got back from RSA. I was unable to travel this time. How was it? How was the experience?
It was good. I don't know if you can hear it, I keep coughing. I lost my voice on the first day of RSA because it started on Sunday night for me, all the activities, but I lost my voice and I'm still recovering. But it was an amazing RSA.
Yeah, we missed you, brother.
Yeah, I missed you guys too. And hopefully next time it will be a big party and super collaborative for everyone.
I wanted to ask, I follow your posts obviously and you talk a lot about teams that already deal with too much noise and I agree with that of course. Do you think that more AI will bring more clarity or it's going to be more noise but fueled by AI?
I think I hope both. I think what we're seeing right now is there's just an explosion of data, right? There's so much data and AI is generating even more data. Everybody's building, everybody's using LLMs for something or another and it's generating a lot more data. And so then with more data, without the right security tooling, you're going to have a lot more noise. The promise is right, like that AI should be helping us with clarity, meaning that if we apply AI to this data then that should help security teams with context and getting kind of more narrow on what they need to look at. And I hope that there's a promise in the future around that. I see a lot of companies building in this space to help security practitioners go and make sure that you've got the right tooling and AI is being leveraged in the security program, but 100% like the data explosion is real, right? We're seeing it everywhere, it's why there's so much innovation happening too in the cybersecurity space right now.
Yeah, totally agree. Do you think that the AI is going to shift the bottlenecks elsewhere? I mean today as security practitioners we have to deal with tons of data, mountains of data, and I think that AI is starting to help us solve this. Wondering if you think it will shift the bottleneck somewhere else from data.
It's really interesting. I think that when I think about security leaders right now, it was funny, security used to be a bottleneck. It's not anymore. It's really like the enabling function for AI within an organization beyond security use cases on how do we make sure we have the right guardrails, how do we make sure that the input and output is being sanitized, how do we make sure that we're doing this in a safe manner. And so I think the real bottleneck is going to be like innovation keeping up allowing us to leverage the data. There's so much data out there that how do we leverage AI to come up with the things that are going to be really important, and I think that's going to be like where you apply the innovation in your tech stack is going to be I think where you decide. So I don't know that data is going to be the bottleneck. I see this ending up being that there's going to be some really cool solutions we can put in place to help with making use of the data.
Yeah. And you as I mentioned you talk a lot about context and the fact that the context really matters more than volume. And I was wondering if you could share what in your opinion helps the team understand what actually matters out of those giant friction or fragmented pieces of information that all the tools are swamping us with.
Yeah. I mean like I think about even simple things, right? Like right now if someone's using let's say like a malicious tool in the organization it'll pop up an alert and everybody will jump on it. I mean why aren't you now should have the context that oh that was a malicious tool. It's from your red team that is doing something that they should be doing. Nothing to be alarmed in. It's like in a sandbox environment and they were intentionally doing this. And you should have all that context and not just the context anymore, right? Because even with the context the volume might be high. It's like give me actionable intel. So then also recommend hey you can probably ignore this because here's all the context and here you can probably ignore this alert because it's fine. This behavior is normal in your environment and yet like that's still this is still like a table stakes issue, right? And so this is where context is so important that like just getting alert. Think about the hours that people will waste going in having to dig up this stuff that honestly should be provided right up front so that we can then spend our time on the more important things.
Yeah, I have a lot of horror stories that I'm sure that you do as well. And I can share that we've been working lately on making sure that context really gets into the front seat before other things and we realize that not all the organizations and environments are equal. For some people, cloud can be the most important crown jewel and for others something else can be a crown jewel. And I think that today with all the hype and the excitement right now around AI and what AI can introduce into security teams, I think that the struggle is with understanding what matters and what to do next. So as a CISO with so many years of experience and you've seen things, do you think that AI can help us with that as CISOs and practitioners to understand the context as we would as humans?
Yeah, I think that right now you're going to still require, when this had you asked me even six months ago, like Ron I think you mentioned it at the beginning like the world has changed over the six months, I would say even in terms of the advancements that have happened with AI and not many of us could have predicted it. And so now when you ask me are there going to be things that we can do without human in the loop, I think so, but I still think for most security use cases based on tooling now you're still going to need a human in the loop for at least for the foreseeable future. What I will say what AI is helping with though, like I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked when like as a CISO a big enterprise you have an opportunity to go buy any tooling you want, like you can go and say okay I want to go buy this product, you need the product is usually like not cheap and you need people to operate that product. And so then you're going back and saying okay I can get this tool that I'm going to have to bring in, it's going to cost me some certain amount of dollars and I need a team to operate it, then you're going to need partnerships within the company to go and integrate and build this stuff. It doesn't happen overnight. It's why this is so difficult. I think what AI is shifting now, and I'm happy about this because I've always been a huge advocate for small and medium-sized businesses that a lot of times those companies struggle because they hit a security breach. They don't have the staff. They don't have the tooling. And I think what AI is going to enable is to have some kind of like here now you don't need to necessarily have this large security team or have to have these platforms. You can bring on something that's for builders and go and put it in their environment so that they have some table stake security in place and I think that's the game that's going to start we're going to see shifting and I'm really excited about that.
Yeah, that's amazing. I totally agree and I'm happy that we see that we share the same view on that. Here's a question that in light of Anthropic and Claude Code announcing they're stepping into the industry and what that done to all the stock market and everything. It's pretty amazing impact. Don't you think?
