White Box Cybersecurity, Because Your Company Is Not An ATM

Do you think of your company as a corporate office with geographically dispersed field offices, vendors, a logistics chain, and customers? If so, you are adopting a model that can be boiled down to this: 

"Our company is an ATM" (or cash point, for you UK readers).

Now of course you don't think you run an ATM. But that's how you're operating.

An ATM is a hardened machine that sits in a location and people approach it and it connects to your servers and, when it's working, it dispenses a service (a.k.a. currency) to customers. 

Many companies, include multi-billion-dollar entities, expect that customers come to them: their website, their bakery, their restaurant, their hospital. And that's OK.

Your 21st century company is not in one place. It exists where it gathers data from the customer. It's a ring, an activity tracker/watch, a glucose monitor, a "smart appliance," a phone or tablet, a mobile credit card swipe device, a sensor, a medical device, a satellite, a college. 

Your 21st century company can operate in a dispersed manner because it has cybersecurity that frequently is not wired to a server farm. The cybersecurity needs to shift to the point of interaction.

In terms of knowledge maintenance and monitoring and creation, your 21st century company deploys an AI platform with agents ("RAGs") that enhance the services you provide. That means that you create and gather data at an exponential growth rate. (Let me note that I am using the term "exponential" correctly: the amount of your data ingest probably will quadruple in 2-3 years.)

Because your 'big data' problem is managed by your AI agentic platform, your company is a target for deep learning/black box-based AI seeking to exploit weaknesses in your model. In a basic model of this attack, think of this like someone walking down a street, and car by parked car the person lifts the handle of the vehicle to see whether it's unlocked; if unlocked, reach in and steal something, otherwise keep walking to the next vehicle.

That type of attack & its more sophisticated cousins will reduce your company to an out of order ATM. No satellite imagery or wireless medical devices or ability to swipe credit cards.

You need a white box cybersecurity model to know what's going on and prevent or stop exploitation. That model is a shared responsibility among senior managers and the board. It needs to be how you operate your risk management plan.

The board probably has an audit committee that wants to know when "something" happens. Well, as a security or intelligence professional at any level, you know for a fact that "nothing" may happen but that means that you were actively monitoring and defending to ensure that in fact "nothing" happened. What you do may not be clear to the board or senior managers. But now in the AI world that we are moving into, you need to make it clear. Use a white box cybersecurity model to ensure that your company is ready for what awaits.

Ask us how we can help prepare you for the company you want to grow into. Because AI black box threats will treat your company like an ATM.