00:00U.S. businesses and exposing gaps in AI security. Joining us now is Nadab Zafir, CEO of Checkpoint.
00:06He joins us from the RSA Cybersecurity Conference in San Francisco with more.
00:10Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I would love to just get your thoughts.
00:14We've heard a lot of back and forth this morning with the president saying that he was delaying his ultimatum,
00:19if you will.
00:19Five days of no strikes on energy infrastructure. Iran says that they have not been in talks.
00:23I just wonder this type of volatility, this type of back and forth, does it change anything for you and
00:28what you're doing at Checkpoint?
00:31Well, in fact, I think if the latest news about coming to a resolution are true, then we will probably
00:39see an intensification of the cyber attacks following that.
00:43That's what we've seen in prior conflicts.
00:47And cyber, because of its nature, is just one of those tools where even after there is a resolution, we
00:54will see more and more intensification of these cyber attacks.
00:57That's what we're preparing for.
00:58Can you, Nadav, break that down and explain it to us?
01:02For example, after the 12-day war in June of last year, after we obliterated their nuclear potential with our
01:12B-2 bombers, did you see cyber attacks increase after that conflict?
01:17Oh, absolutely.
01:20Oh, absolutely. Cyber is one of those tools where you can use them in between kinetic wars and following kinetic
01:28wars.
01:28And we need to remember that we're not seeing these attacks out of context.
01:33They're happening at a time where we're changing our networks.
01:37There are three things that are happening as this war is going on and regardless of the work.
01:42The first one is democratization of the very capable tools because more people can get access to these tools using
01:50AI.
01:51The second thing is that there's an agentification of our networks.
01:56And so, at least for the short term, we're more vulnerable.
01:58And these attacks can be industrialized using AI.
02:03And that's why we're seeing this not just proliferation of capabilities, but also intensification of these attacks.
02:09Can you lay out just how much that intensity has picked up or shifted or altered since the start of
02:16this month, since war broke out in Iran?
02:20Well, I believe that Iran is sending a message.
02:25Everybody is vulnerable.
02:26And so they can either use it by kinetic strikes or using cyber.
02:31And cyber is a tool that they can use beyond, you know, the capacity of their strike of their kinetic
02:36striking capability.
02:37And so I think we're seeing more of it.
02:39We're seeing new targets.
02:41And I think it's a message that the Iranians are sending.
02:44And they're using existing capabilities.
02:47I think in the next few months, we will see intensification and industrialization of these capabilities, of course, because AI
02:56is being proliferated.
02:58And attackers are using AI just as we're using it in defense.
03:02How has AI changed the game, Nadav?
03:04I mean, especially for the bad actors, how important is the development of this technology?
03:12Well, it's absolutely changing the game.
03:14In some ways, we need to re-break the game.
03:17You know, cyber is not really about technology.
03:19It's sort of a learning competition between offense and defense.
03:23And notoriously, it's an asymmetric learning competition and grace.
03:28Attackers can learn faster and adopt faster because of several reasons.
03:32They don't have to go through the bureaucracy.
03:35You know, they can iterate really, really fast because if they make a mistake, the price is very low.
03:40And so at least for the short term, we're in this valley of naivete where we are already incorporating AI
03:47capabilities into our networks because of their incredible capabilities.
03:50But we are creating new vulnerabilities that we don't even know yet.
03:56And attackers are notoriously taking advantage of that.
03:59And so that's where we are right now.
04:00Are those new vulnerabilities, Nadav, data centers?
04:05Have we, as we undergo this project in the United States, but also globally to build out a robust infrastructure
04:12for AI,
04:13how at the forefront is the protection from cyber threats as these get built out?
04:21Yeah, so when you think about it, if we go through these three stages of what's happening, right,
04:27the democratization means that more will have it.
04:29Industrialization means that the frequency will be faster.
04:32And gentrification means that what we're protecting is dramatically changing.
04:35What we need to do is three things.
04:37Number one is we need to reassess everything that we've done in the last 30 years.
04:41Some of it requires fine tuning, and some of it literally we need to replace, rip and replace,
04:48and we don't have a long time to do that.
04:51The second thing we need to do is we need to secure the new attack surface that we're creating.
04:56These agents that, if we want to harness them, are creating new pathways within our organization.
05:01And so what we're protecting is changing.
05:03And the last thing that we're doing is we are using AI to protect against AI.
05:08And so we sort of look at it as, if you want, as RSA, right, we need to reassess,
05:13we need to secure the new attack vector, and we need to use the AI in order to secure against
05:18AI.
05:19We are seeing, you know, the president wants another $200 billion added to our more than $1 trillion military budget,
05:26annual budget.
05:27And, of course, countries around the world are raising their budgets as well, most notably in Europe,
05:35because they're worried that they can't count on the U.S.
05:37everyone, as Peter Cheer put it, wants to have an independent vertical supply chain.
05:44Are you seeing commensurate revenue growth, Nadav, you know, with that story?
05:49We're definitely seeing the potential, as you said.
05:53Cyber is a part of everything digital that we do.
05:58And because we are in a stage where everything is accelerating exponentially,
06:03we are also changing those infrastructure in order to harness AI,
06:07at the same time creating new vulnerabilities.
06:10And so the answer is yes.
06:12An AI data center, just as an example, is a different infrastructure,
06:19and protecting it means that we will need to build new capabilities.
06:22So, for example, at Checkpoint, we're building our new AI data center capabilities with NVIDIA.
06:29We're partnering with others to create the full security plan for employee uses of AI for the new applications.
06:37And the holy grail is creating a foundational model so that we can create what we call the guardian agent
06:45that will be able to not just put guardrails, because those may become obsolete very, very fast,
06:51but rather be able to do it in a run-times security fashion.
