No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:05:07 · George Kurtz
[00:05:07] S0: We're seeing a lot of it on the open weight models, right? If you look at, I mean, just the guardrails on the latest generation of any of the frontier models. To be candid, you can barely create a PowerPoint that has cyber security in it. I mean, it literally rejects you and bumps you down to a lower model. So what we've seen is, you know, again, if you look at GLM, if you look at Quinn, if you look at any other sort of models that are out there, they've been very effective in being able to deal with cyber security and many of the models are either ablated or specifically built just for cyber. It might be for red teaming and those are the type of attacks where you could actually just run these when you can run them on. I've got two spark DGXs at home and you know I've got all the models running and you know whatever I want to do I can do. You want to create ransomware? No problem. You want to create a ransomware kit? No issue. You want to deploy? You want to iterate? I mean it's all there for you and you know that is like one step removed from just running it all on your laptop. And we think about where Mac is today. Even the new Macs that are coming out, The studios they're going be incredible AI machines, so the tip of the spear is going to be what you can run without the guardrails and the frontier models are sort of helpful and in terms of if you needed PowerShell scripts or those sort of things. But certainly you can do a lot of it with the open weight models right now.
00:06:37 · Elad Gil
[00:06:37] S2: And is there a common geography? Like are most of the attacks coming from a single region? Is there a common attack type? Is that mainly ransomware? Is it something else? Is it phishing campaigns? I'm little bit curious, like has the mix shifted as you've kind of seen the adoption of AI tools?
00:06:50 · George Kurtz
[00:06:50] S0: We sort of look at it, maybe just reframe the question a little bit, because we look at it from an adversary perspective. You know, is it a nation state? Is it e crime? Nation state, we sort of, you know, we've come up with these names of bears and pandas, depending if they're Russia or it could be from Iran, kittens and other things. But we've seen a lot of attacks. We see North Korea being very busy with these sort of attacks. They've got to, shall we say, get money into their economy, so they've been very busy you know, stealing information. A lot of it around ransomware and getting paid. But yeah, I think overall what we've seen is a lot of we've seen obviously out of China. A lot of activity using AI, and we've also seen it in the e crime world where when someone gets onto a system, we track breakout time. That is, if they got onto your system, how long would it take them to actually break out and pivot and move to a different system? Generally, the system they first land on is not the most interesting. It could be, but it's not the most interesting. The crown jewels might be somewhere else. So on that used to be days and hours, and now it's minutes. On average, it's twenty nine minutes, but we've seen it as quick as twenty seven seconds. And essentially you know now what we're looking at is the speed of inference. So as soon as they get on the machine, can just see it iterating very quickly and what people have to keep in mind is it's not malware anymore. It's prompts so they can basically engineer prompts that would uniquely create a totally unique signature of what direction they're going to go in, how they gather information, where they pivot, which makes it more challenging to figure all that out. But that's what we're seeing right now, and it's across the board from the nation state and e crime actors for sure.
00:08:34 · Sarah Guo
[00:08:34] S1: You have been a leader in security since, you know, Foundstone, CrowdStrike... The founding of CrowdStrike. Would you say that they're... Like, how do you put the current period of increase in capability, like attacker capability and perhaps defender capability in context? Right? Are we in a more adversary dominant world right now? Like, how do you think about the problem overall?
00:09:01 · George Kurtz
[00:09:01] S0: Well, I think it's one of the most exciting times to be in technology. I mean, really, I've been doing this thirty plus years. And, you know, what I always like to say is that security parallels the slope of the technology curve. When I first got into security, it was a Cisco router and like maybe a website barely, right? There really weren't firewalls. There were these tool kits, TIS toolkit and these other things probably dating myself, but you know there wasn't much there. Now if you think about the complexity of where we are today with with cloud, with all of the other technologies around AI, I'm not going go through all of them, but it's a lot more complex today than it was way back then. So you need all these little companies and including big companies that are able to secure all these technologies. So when we think about where we are today, it actually is the most exciting, but it also creates the biggest opportunity because the adversaries generally find the gaps or the seams. So they'll find new technologies that maybe that they don't have good protection, that they're taking advantage of things like NPM packages, right? In the old world, as you very well know, no one in corporate America would just download anything and run it on their computer. It had to be vetted and scanned and all these sort of things. And now we unleash an agent. We give it an identity, which is essentially our own or worse, and then we unleash it and we say, Do whatever you want to do. And by the way, download whatever package you want to download. And obviously these are the kind of things that cause a tremendous amount of exposure. So we're sort of getting to grips
00:10:32 · Sarah Guo, George Kurtz, Elad Gil
[00:10:32] S1: And nobody's reading any of the production code as it gets. [00:10:36] S0: No, they're not. I mean, you know, you see some of these things in a while and you're scratching your head. You shouldn't be surprised. I mean, it was like, let's give it a task and we'll come back in a few days and we'll hope it all worked. Nobody's watching it. Nobody understands what it's doing, and it's problematic. So you know we can. We can talk about sort of the explainability of what these agents are doing, which is going to be really important, but right now it's like a black box and nobody knows what's going on. They hope you know something happens and pops out on the on the other side of it, but it's a great time to be in technology. AI is fundamentally going to change the world and the frontier labs are doing amazing things, but ultimately it's going to come down to security enabling these sort of technologies. For the first time, security is the gas pedal, not the brake. And that's what we're seeing. [00:11:24] S2: What is the moment that you realized this inflection was happening, at least in the security world? And I think for a lot of people, the hugging face OpenAI issue was a big moment where people realized there's a big c shift in terms of capabilities and technology and what could happen. And to your point, are things being monitored, etcetera? Was was that a seminal moment for you, what are some [00:11:43] S0: of the seminal moments? Let me ask you a question first. So what was your big takeaway from Hugging Face?