• The Deep View
  • Posts
  • ⚙️ Cybersecurity expert: The ‘zero-trust’ world of AI

⚙️ Cybersecurity expert: The ‘zero-trust’ world of AI

Good morning.  Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, and are all properly fed and watered in anticipation of a hectic Black Friday. 

Or maybe you, like me, do your Black Friday shopping online and will spend the day dreaming about the Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich you’re gonna make yourself at lunch. 

To each his own. 

But, considering that technology and digital gadgets tend to make up a good portion of Black Friday purchases, I figured today would be a good day to jump, once again, into that intersection of AI and cybersecurity. 

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

  • 👁️‍🗨️ Cybersecurity expert: The ‘zero-trust’ world of AI

If you are not an AI-powered professional today, you will either:

  • Get replaced by a person who uses AI

  • Face a slow career growth & lower salary 

  • Keep spending 10s of hours on tasks that can be done in 10 minutes.

But don’t fret– there is one resource that can CHANGE your life, but only if you’re ready to take action NOW.

Best thing? We’re running the Black Friday Sale so you can get it for absolutely free (for the first 100 readers)

Save your seat now (Offer valid for 24 hours only )

This 3 hour power packed workshop that will teach you 25+ AI Tools, make you a master of prompting & talk about hacks, strategies & secrets that only the top 1% know of.

By the way, here’s sneak peek into what’s inside the training:

  • Making money using AI 💰

  • The latest AI developments, like GPT o1 🤖

  • Creating an AI clone of yourself, that functions exactly like YOU 🫵

  • 10 BRAND new AI tools to automate your work & cut work time by 50% ⏱️

And a lot more that you’re not ready for, just 3 hours! 🤯

So don’t think twice, you have NOTHING to lose. Consider it a $0 investment that will yield value worth millions. 

1.5 Million people are already RAVING about this hands-on Training on AI Tools. Don’t take our word for it? Attend for yourself and see.

Register here (first 100 people get it for free + $500 bonus) 🎁

  • OpenAI gets new $1.5 billion investment from SoftBank, allowing employees to sell shares in a tender offer (CNBC).

  • Someone made a dataset of one million BlueSky posts for ‘machine learning research’ (404 Media).

  • Uber is getting into the AI-labeling business (The Verge).

  • OpenAI sales chief sees ‘paradigm shift’ in corporate AI spending (The Information).

  • Australia bans social media for under-16s in world first (Semafor).

If you want to get in front of an audience of 200,000+ developers, business leaders and tech enthusiasts, get in touch with us here.

  • Hiring the best Machine Learning Engineer just got 70% cheaper.

    Today we are highlighting AI talent for you, courtesy of our partner, Athyna. If you are looking for the best bespoke tech talent, these stars are ready to work with you—today!

  • Reach out here if we can make an introduction to these talents and get a $1,000 discount because you’re a reader of The Deep View! Start hiring today *

Sales Teams are Selling More with AI Role-Plays!

AI role-plays are becoming the crucial tool to unlocking sales success! Studies show that sales teams that use AI are already seeing a substantial increase in revenue vs. those that don’t.

Second Nature’s AI role-plays are built for sales teams:

  • Oracle NetSuite doubled their monthly logos & achieved 32% more opportunities

  • GoHealth saw 20% increase in sales

  • Personalize your sales team’s training to get consistent, objective evaluations that improve sellers confidence and performance.

  • Enable managers to track progress and weak points of their team and adjust training accordingly

  • Improve your team's sales readiness by 45% 

Second Nature is one of Selling Power’s top AI coaching solutions and is already helping customers like Zoom, SAP, Oracle, TitleMax and Adobe see amazing results!

Cybersecurity expert on the importance of digital health

Source: Created with AI by The Deep View

In many ways, artificial intelligence, privacy and cybersecurity are all closely interrelated. 

Algorithms and machine learning have been a favored tool of cybersecurity professionals for years, aiding them in their constant battle to keep networks secure. Such tech has also been a favored tool of hackers, threat actors and cybercriminals, aiding them in their regular efforts to infiltrate networks. 

This has all heated up recently, with Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI enhancing everyone’s capabilities. For cybercriminals, this is coming out in a number of ways, Protexxa founder and CEO Claudette McGowan told me; beyond the mass deployment of deepfakes and misinformation, her firm is seeing instances of data poisoning and the spread of malware through generative AI models. 

And average internet users, meanwhile, live in the middle of this battlefield, unwittingly producing the data that has fueled these algorithms, unknowingly giving cybercriminals the very weapons that are then deployed against them.

Your digital footprint: Your digital footprint refers to your digital profile; every action you take online — every Google search, every social media click, search, like or comment, every email you send, every email you open, every email you delete, every website you go to, every app you download, how long you spend on each website you open, etc. — gets collected, parsed, curated (and sold) by a number of organizations, from website owners to app developers, social media platforms and data brokers. 

  • As of 2021, there were 540 officially registered data brokers in the U.S. — this doesn’t count the data that’s collected and sold by cybercriminals. These guys are legal. 

  • And your digital profile is probably a lot bigger than you might think. See, everything I listed above refers to active data collection, which is essentially usage-related data. But many apps and services also passively collect data about you (this stuff is all in their privacy policies, but man, those are skippable. I, however, love reading them). 

Here, that passive collection of data could include location information (tracking data) and device information, such as what kind of hardware you’re using, what apps you have on your device, what browsers you use, when you’re on wifi versus cellular, whether and when you plug in headphones, what websites you visit, information regarding your device’s phonebook and information regarding your device’s camera roll. 

This sounds like a lot. But each of these is mentioned specifically in Snapchat’s privacy policy

But, okay, even that one’s not surprising — Snapchat is a photo and communication social media app, at the end of the day. Here’s one that may surprise you, though: your car collects and sells information about you. And the type of that information, according to a report last year, is largely unnecessary. 

For instance, Nissan collects video and audio recordings of their drivers, internet search history (you plug your phone into your car, after all), records of personal property, your age, race, name, ethnicity and sex, your credit card number, your education and employment history and address, among other things. 

Why should you care: Even if that data is just collected, rather than being sold, it is still vulnerable to hackers. And data leaks have become somewhat common. 

  • That data, once acquired, according to one cybersecurity professor, can be used “to suss out answers to security challenge questions like ‘in what city did you meet your spouse?’ or to hone phishing attacks by posing as a colleague or work associate. When phishing attacks are successful, they give the attackers access to networks and systems the victims are authorized to use.”

  • And generative AI has become a powerful tool in the realm of parsing and processing all that data to quickly find needles in haystacks, to develop hyperpersonalized phishing attacks or break into secure networks. 

This is all in addition to the most prominent way your data is legally used, which involves hyper-personalized advertising and marketing campaigns. 

The reality here, according to McGowan, is that the risk at hand is not just personal. The line between work and personal footprints has become completely blurred to the point of nonexistence, something spurred on in part by the pandemic. 

“If I happen to get so lucky as to infiltrate someone's device, do I think I'm only going to find personal things there? Or are there snapshots of the (work) screen that you took because it was easier than sending it through … there's all these ways that we bypass process,” she said. 

Websites you access and log into on a corporate device, corporate portals you access on a personal device, or, for instance, using ChatGPT or a similar chatbot to summarize work-related information … these all represent added vulnerabilities in a long, vulnerable chain that can be tugged on by cyber criminals. 

“So the line is blurred. How do we fix this? I think obviously number one is education,” McGowan said, saying that as much as it is important for people to become AI literate, people have to “get cyber literate. You can’t be connected and not protected. So this education piece is very big.”

Adding that having a visual way to access and assess your digital health is vital, right now, she added that technical solutions aren’t always the answer. It all starts with smart processes and shifts in mindset, such as code words between family and friends.

  • “To me, it's zero trust. It's that innocence that we have as a species that we have to now say, ‘I'm gonna fight against that, and I'm gonna just validate everything, and I'm gonna have multiple layers of validation,’” McGowan said.

  • “I don't believe we're in a world today where we can just take everything at face value … we have to check and challenge everything.”

Protexxa, which offers an AI-powered cybersecurity solution to connect the dots between personal and corporate cyber hygiene, recently closed a $10 million Series A funding round. 

McGowan told me that her clients were “not ready” for the threat of the AI boom. Many didn’t have strategies or policies in place in advance, which means those strategies are being written on the go. And in that, the key thing that’s been missing revolves around standards and education — “we're seeing this kind of rush to governance and frameworks and looking at privacy and the education and bringing people up that data literacy curve.”

This is all very much in line with impressions shared by other cybersecurity experts, who have told me that we need a massive shift in culture around digital trust, mainly, that we can no longer trust, by default, anything we encounter in a digital environment.

Which image is real?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 1 (Left):

  • “I first zoomed in on both and couldn't really figure out any obvious tells. so I zoomed back out and flipped between them. The perspective of Image 2 felt ‘off’ like the uncanny valley.”

Selected Image 2 (Right):

  • “Fingers on (the) right hand of 1 looked strange.”

💭 A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

Here’s your view on digital clones:

32% of you are not interested; 25% might be, but only with proper guardrails and regulations.

13% said it’ll never happen; 13% think it would be cool.

No, thank you:

  • “We need to protect real art. It’s what makes us truly human.”

Favorite Thanksgiving dessert?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.