Dive Brief:

• Overwhelmed cybersecurity executives hope AI can help them avoid missing signs of intrusions, even as they remain wary of the technology’s potential risks, the security firm Red Canary said in a report published on Thursday.
• The report shows why so many security leaders are embracing AI: Three-quarters of them reported not having enough people skilled at intrusion detection, while 72% reported a skills shortage around incident response.
• In addition, nearly three-quarters of security leaders said the amount of time it takes to resolve an intrusion has increased.

Dive Insight:

Red Canary’s report suggests that companies view AI as a partial solution to the significant burnout rates that threaten their defensive postures.

The report, based on a survey of 550 cybersecurity leaders from the U.S. and other Western countries, found that 85% of respondents worry about being overwhelmed by the volume of threats if they don’t use artificial intelligence to help spot intrusions.

“AI works best as a force multiplier, augmenting human judgment rather than replacing it,” Red Canary co-founder Brian Beyer said in a statement. “The organizations that lean into this shift now will not only ease the strain on security analysts, but put themselves in the best position to anticipate emerging threats and stay ahead of disruption in an increasingly unpredictable environment.”

But AI is also exacerbating security leaders’ worries even as it augments their capabilities. Three-quarters of respondents said they worried AI would reduce their problem-solving abilities, a major concern given the importance of human expertise in stopping increasingly creative attacks. Nearly half (43%) of respondents said their organization had already experienced a cyber incident related to their AI tools.

At the same time, executives think AI could help them spot increasingly sophisticated identity-based attacks. Nearly two-thirds of respondents are using AI for detection analytics, with another 59% using it for intrusion detection. Roughly 80% of security leaders reported experiencing intrusions in which attackers broke in with stolen credentials rather than malware.

The expanding range of devices that security teams have to protect has also made their jobs more difficult. Red Canary reported that the average organization’s attack surface has grown by 41% over the past year.

Survey respondents reported an average breach cost of $3.7 million, and nearly half of respondents said breaches had temporarily disrupted their services.