Overcoming Security Blind Spots Through Automation, Innovation and AI with Former JLL CISO Joe Silva

On the 22nd episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Joe Silva, former Chief Information Security Officer at Jones Lang LaSalle. JLL is a commercial real estate company operating in 84 countries worldwide. The company has over 100,000 employees, $20 billion dollars in annual revenue,  and ranks #193 on the Fortune 500. Managing billions of square feet of property worldwide, JLL delivers a full suite of services, including — property management, leasing, capital markets, and real estate technology solutions. In this conversation, Joe dives into the realities versus the hype of AI in cybersecurity, AI’s role in shifting the balance between human judgment and automated systems, and AI’s potential to solve long-standing defender blind spots.

Quick hits from Joe:
On the new attack surface presented by AI: “If I look at how corporate functions at large enterprises, HR, finance, they were using RPAs (robotic process automations) to automate so much of this work, and now you look at AI agents as essentially hyper aware RPAs. It's a natural evolution. RPAs, which themselves created a massive attack surface and now we just start moving all of that to AI because we're completely taking the human out of the loop.”

On the increasing negative impact of AI cyberthreats: “Criminals can leverage AI to create highly bespoke and tailored fraud to individuals whose identities they can stitch together across multiple data sets. Organizations will start feeling the impact of AI abetting criminal activity, and that will raise the consequences.”

On areas that AI is moving the needle: “Gen AI is making it a lot easier for providers to make more information accessible and provide more context in tools…Where we see Gen AI being helpful is the ability to train machine learning models, and actually get more utility out of machine learning. We've been hearing ML and AI for the last 10 years as buzzwords associated with products and the utility of ML has improved due to AI.”

Book Recommendation: Five Years to Freedom by James N. Rowe

--

Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.