E251 The AI Cyber Arms Race: Attackers vs Defenders with Smarttech247's Raluca Saceanu
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How are cyber‑attacks becoming faster, cheaper, and AI‑driven?
No matter how advanced cybersecurity gets or AI gets, the fundamentals still apply. They will always apply. So when you're planning for the future, plan with that hygiene and the fundamentals in mind as well. Nowadays we're seeing the scale from initial compromise, so that's when they get in to moving throughout the organization in a matter of minutes. Defenders have Because as a defender, you know your environment better than anyone else. We're taking all that manual work that used to take a lot of time. Um, we're building a lot of intelligence around it. We're compressing the the time in which we can respond to an incident. And we still have the human in the loop, which is absolutely important.
Hello everyone. We are here today in Guinness Enterprise Centre and I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Raluca Chachanu, who is the CEO of Smart Tech two for seven. Raluca, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today.
Thank you for having me.
So we're gonna dive straight into it. What has changed in the threat intelligent landscape in the last, I don't know, six, nine, twelve months, or even the last three months?
A lot has changed. Um, however, the types of attacks that we see are still the kind of same old attacks. You know, people still exploit the the human nature, phishing. We still see a lot of SQL injections, remote code executions. Um, but what has changed is the number one, the the speed, the scale, and the impact uh that these attacks can have. But also the the the cost, you know, it's much cheaper nowadays for attackers to r run their operations I mentioned earlier the speed. Um a few years ago we would have seen these attacks um evolve and be successful within hours, days, even weeks. And nowadays we're seeing the the scale from initial compromise, so that's when they get in, to moving throughout the organization in a matter of minutes, you know, um under thirty minutes.
Of course a lot of the other attacks or can be much faster as well. Um and they can also take their time depending on how targeted the the attacks are. So when we look at why this is happening We we like to summarize these under three main forces that drive these kind of um attacks. Number one, the geopolitical landscape has an enormous impact over the over the attacks. Um research shows that whenever the geopolitical risk index, we call it, rises, uh thirty five percent um or we see a thirty five percent increase in cyber attacks and when you look at the wars that have um been taking place in the last few years, uh the the latest one being the war in Iran, it's a prime example of cyber attacks um scaling really fast.
And we've seen it here in Ireland as well. Uh number two as a force is the systemic dependency that we have. You know, we're we're dependent on Massive supply chains, whether we like it or not. The tools that we use also use tools who also use tools and sometimes we don't even know these tools. We have never even heard of them.
Why do defenders gain an advantage by thinking like attackers?
So they create a lot of um uh risk concentration that we don't know about and it it puts us in a vulnerable position. And then of course the third one is artificial intelligence. AI has significantly changed the infrastructure of of organizations these days. And the best way to look at it is as an organization you've got your multiple layers of defense. You've got your people, you've got your endpoints, you've got your applications. got your networks and you've got your data that you have to defend. And with AI now being so prevalent, it m automatically changes your attack surface because AI touches on all those layers. it has impacted your human layer, your data layer, your application layer. So like I said, inevitably your attack surface has has massively expanded.
question that I think about a lot is businesses are spending more and more billions I haven't got the number to hand, but I know it's a lot. But there feels like there's just as many breaches that we're hearing about and I can only imagine the ones we're not hearing about. Is that because AI has enabled the attacker to be better than the defender using it?
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How are cyber‑attacks becoming faster, cheaper, and AI‑driven?
0:00–3:35
2
Why do defenders gain an advantage by thinking like attackers?
3:35–6:34
3
How does ransomware impact small businesses and supply‑chain suppliers?
6:34–10:20
4
What does “security‑by‑design” mean for AI‑focused startups?
10:20–13:36
5
Why are cybersecurity fundamentals and human oversight still critical with AI?
13:36–17:48
6
How do AI‑powered security operations enable faster, smarter incident response?
17:48–21:04
7
What role does Enterprise Ireland play in supporting Smarttech247’s growth?
21:04–23:33
Speakers
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