Varonis: Data Security for the AI Era

Organizations are thinking about the role generative AI can play in their operations, whether that is in terms of productivity or security defense. With Microsoft rolling out Copilot across its product portfolio, CISOs have to think about potential risks and necessary actions to keep the organization's data secure.

Varonis vice president of incident response and cloud operations Matt Radolec discusses the security risks around new generative AI tools. "This is something now that security teams absolutely have to monitor. You have to look for people abusing this just as much as the business wants to look for people using it," Radolec says.

Radolec uses the analogy of a bank account and how the financial institution has a ledger listing who has made withdrawals and deposits. The bank also has fraud detection in place to detect that the location of the transaction is not the same location of the account holder. Organizations need to look at their data the same way banks look at money because Copilot is accessing the data to produce net new information.

"There's so much, so much power here. But there's a lot of responsibility for organizations to secure access to dataso that the Copilots don't have access to too much," Radolec says.

Matt Radolec is vice president of incident response and cloud operations at Varonis, leading a global team of security and cloud experts. The Varonis Incident Response Team, created and led by Radolec, help organizations thwart insider threats and cyberattacks. He also hosts a video podcast series, “State of Cybercrime.”