The Intersection of AI and Cybersecurity with Dover CISO Rahul Naroola

Enterprise Software Defenders

On the 6th episode of Enterprise Software Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Rahul Naroola, Chief Information Security Officer at Dover. Dover is a Fortune 500 global manufacturing company with over 25,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. In this conversation, Rahul shares his thoughts on AI-generated attacks, applications of AI to boost productivity, and realistic expectations for the future of AI security tools.
Quick hits from Rahul:
On the promise shown by AI cybertools: “You should be able to say, ‘I want you to tell me when there is a login attempt that happens that's unusual.’ The AI is supposed to elastically, figure out what that is, right? So that tremendously helps where we are not looking at a finite set of possibilities, but a much broader set of security possibilities. I think there's promise there. I think in the email space, which constantly morphs, there's a lot of promise there.”
On the potential impact of AI on cybersecurity teams: “We can always teach technology to folks that are in your SOC or on your team. But if they don't have that business centric mindset, they don't understand the business that you are in. Like we're in manufacturing, they don't understand how we actually make stuff. What are the people that need to interact with and why?
Getting an AI savvy person won't really take you that far. For me, we are not going to see changes in the team in terms of personnel for the most part. I think we have to really invest in training our teams so they can understand and recognize these new emerging technologies and be savvy on how to use it best to their advantage.”
On AI’s impact beyond security: “I don't think it's just security. It's going to have a big impact on analytics and how analysis is done across the businesses, which honestly, from a SOC perspective, they're running a large data analytics engine anyways, that's really what they're doing. So I think both the data analytics side on the business side as well as on the security side, is gonna benefit with sort of the same core principles that AI offers.”
Recent Book Recommendation: The Metail Economy by Joe Bines
--
Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Enterprise Software Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/
Enterprise Software Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.