On AI and Cybersecurity: An Interview with CrowdStrike at GITEX GLOBAL 

Whilst at GITEX GLOBAL in Dubai, we got to talk to Roland Daccache, Senior Sales Engineering Manager Middle East and Africa at CrowdStrike – who were exhibiting their products and services – about how they are implementing AI in their business.

How is CrowdStrike using AI to improve threat detection?

At CrowdStrike, we’ve been at the forefront of AI innovation in cybersecurity from the beginning. We pioneered the shift from signature-based antivirus to ML-based protection, and introduced AI-Powered Indicators of Attack, a fundamentally new approach to stopping breaches combining the analysis of adversary behavior with the power of cloud AI. Our latest innovation, Charlotte AI, is a purpose-built generative AI security assistant that enables users to ask questions in plain language about their security environment. Charlotte AI empowers analysts of all skill levels to more quickly identify and respond to threats, and provides actionable insights to stay ahead of modern adversaries.

How do you reduce false positives with AI in cybersecurity?

At CrowdStrike, data scientists, researchers and analysts work together to map any potential false positives and queue that data to be used in a new training corpus.

What role does AI play in automating threat response?

With attacker breakout times now measured in minutes, AI has emerged as a great equalizer in cybersecurity, equipping teams with a much-needed speed advantage to defend against increasingly sophisticated threats. AI-native cybersecurity can rapidly surface hidden threats, accelerate the decision making of less experienced security analysts and simplify a multitude of complex tasks.

How does your AI adapt to new and evolving cyber threats?

CrowdStrike pioneered the use of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. We launched the industry’s first AI-native platform and introduced AI-powered protection to replace signature-based antivirus more than a decade ago. We invented Indicators of Attack, which brought a fundamentally new approach to stopping breaches based on real adversary behavior, and turbocharged them with AI to rapidly detect emerging classes of threats and predict adversarial patterns, regardless of tools or malware used. By replacing reactive, predefined, rules-based systems, CrowdStrike’s AI-powered behavioral analysis helps companies proactively stop known and unknown (zero-day) threats.

We were also one of the first companies to bring purpose-built GenAI for security teams to market with Charlotte AI. By asking simple questions, analysts can use Charlotte AI to surface the information they need from across the Falcon platform in a matter of seconds or minutes, accelerating workflows that would otherwise take days or hours. Charlotte AI elevates security analysts and accelerates their workflows, all while protecting privacy, auditing for accuracy and enforcing safeguards for maximum safety.

We are constantly innovating and adding new tools and features to our platform that ultimately help stop breaches. We most recently announced new innovations that unify security and IT, including AI-generated parsers, which enable SOC teams to quickly ingest and process data from any source, and AI-powered attack path analysis, which identifies cross-domain exposures and attack paths leading to business-critical assets and data, enabling teams to predict likely adversary behavior based on real-world activity to harden high-risk areas of exposure.

 How is AI helping secure cloud environments?

With CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, security teams can quickly identify high-risk threats and vulnerabilities targeting sensitive data and critical applications. AI automates this process, allowing teams to prioritize the most critical threats without lengthy manual investigations.

How do you balance AI automation with human expertise in threat mitigation?

Humans will always be central in the fight against increasingly sophisticated adversaries. AI will not replace human defenders, but humans who use AI will likely replace those that don’t. Security analysts of all skill levels will need to learn how to use GenAI fluently to help battle some of the most critical challenges facing the industry, including closing the cybersecurity skills gap and speeding response times to stay ahead of adversaries who are themselves beginning to leverage the technology, to stop breaches.

 What future AI innovations is CrowdStrike working on for cybersecurity?

We are constantly innovating and adding new tools and features to our platform that ultimately help stop breaches.