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You're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. So just in the last few days, yes, we've learned that Chinese hackers have targeted the phones of Donald Trump and JD Vance and affiliates of Kamala Harris's campaign. This is all according to NBC News. Then there's this great profile out today by our Bloomberg News colleague, Katrina Manson.
It's about how Jen Easterly, who's director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is working to protect election infrastructure from hacks and misinformation. And we'll need to convince the public. Perhaps that's the hardest job of the elections legitimacy after the vote.
That's right, needlessen to say, Tim, data security is top of mind ahead of the election, and also always top of mind for business leaders looking to safeguard there and ours data. That's where Lane Best comes in. He's the CEO of the deep learning AI CyberSecure platform deep Instinct. He's also the former CEO of the publicly traded security software company z Scaler, and before that, he was the CEO of Palo Alto Network, So yeah, he knows about this stuff. Tim.
It's good to have you with us, Lane, Thanks so much for joining us. Hey, before we get into what exactly Deep Instinct does, because it's it's distinct from some of the other companies that are out there, what is the biggest threat that you think we as a country face when it faces when it comes to cybersecurity, it.
Is really the unknown threats. Today, a lot of the money and resources and expenditures are towards known threats, and the unknown threats are becoming much greater. Seventy two percent of the threats that hit companies and governments today are of an unnever seen nature and therefore the systems that had been trained and the machine learning technologies that are
typically in place can't stop them. And in the early phases of new technologies and all point specifically to AI, the advantage goes to the attackers because they can use simple tools and sophisticated ones to compromise companies' data and
ultimately cause havoc in some cases nation state attacks. It takes a time for the practitioners to catch up because they've already invested millions in the cyber technologies, and they've got to explain why they're going to spend more money to address some of the more challenging, unknown, new, never seen threats. They eventually catch up, but in this early stage, particularly with the AI threats, it can be quite dangerous.
So what are the unknown threats? Potentially? Sure?
So, known threats are usually in families of threats that have been seen before, and the cloud models which many of the companies in cyber have been able to train,
can essentially see them. But typically and using AI tools, they can change code very slightly, and they can inject code, and typically that evades even the best companies defense and depth capabilities, and so simple changes aided in some cases by more sophisticated AI, can take something that was generally in a known category family and creates something entirely unseen before, and therefore it can get through and cause significant data breaches.
Are we more concerned about data breaches? Are we more concerned about an entire electrical grid becoming unusable? About traffic signals being disrupted, in tunnels getting shut down, bank accounts being wiped out, or those related?
They all are related. And the science, particularly the science that we address at deep instinct addresses both cases. Typically, though what we're seeing right now is the biggest cost to companies is in data breaches. The average data breach is a four point five million, and we've seen some notable ones that have been in the hundreds of millions. But if you talk about infrastructure disruption, these what I consider to be infrastructure and nation state attacks. These can
just as easily be launched using the same tools. And if you take a look at the industry, it has been pretty much in a layers of defense, detect, remediate fix afterwards. The posture that governments and also companies has to take now is to get the most sophisticated AI to battle the onslaught of sophisticated AI to prevent these threats, and it does take a specific tibe of technology, one in the form of deep learning that.
We have Selene walk us through the difference between AI, machine learning, and deep learning and how cyber criminals are actually using deep learning right now. Yeah.
So deep learning is like a brain, a neural network, and without getting too much into the science of how it works, you and I can take massive amounts of data in our brain and we can make determinations and with inferences and in our case, instinctual decisions. Machine learning models, which can be very sophisticated, are based on parameters that have been defined by people and rules that are trained by people, and therefore they don't train upon themselves, only
what they've been defined. With deep learning models, Neural network models are self training and take massive amounts of data, in this case anything everything that might be in the cyber space, and essentially extrapolate the potential of something being a threat with ninety nine percent efficacy. So that's probably the biggest differentiation.
When it comes to individuals out there, Like I know that a lot of what you focus on is key being companies safe, but at the end of the day, we're only as strong as the weakest link. And I think that's why correct. And I know we do this here, but we do so much training about understanding phishing understanding.
I just did another training. I think the deadline was on Tuesday. I was on vacational last week and came back and I had you had to do it. I had to do all the courses or they're going to show off.
Correct. But there's a reason why, because with this social engineering, all they need to do to gain access is is get access through one of us.
So it's correct.
What's the way that we need to recognize threats in a world where I can get a phone call. It looks like it's from Amazon, but it's really somebody who wants to steal money from me. It looks like it's from my brink, but it's really someone who wants to steal money from me.
And you hit it on the head most organizations, and it's it's a big business in and of itself. The training and readiness and IT organizations are spending a lot on this, and we ourselves as individuals have to do it because the weakest link is the insider threat, and we've seen many of these stories. Ultimately, though, what happens is those threats get in and in some way they're going to go in and sit within your data sets
or within the applications in your environment. So even if they evade through social engineering, having an efficacy level and ability to determine that something that has come in is not quite kosher is going to be a key backup to the training that needs to take place. And most of the detection and remediation is clean up after the accidents already happen, So I would absolutely you're dead on, and I'm happy to hear that Bloomberg is taking the efforts.
We do it with our own employees regularly, including myself in terms of the social engineering, and this again is where AI tools and some of the simplest tools with regard to social engineering can help evaide.
So I don't know if this happen to you, Tim, but I've been constantly getting messages that are definitely scams, but they're supposed to be from recruiters. But this has been happening to yes or text messages, and this has been happening to some of my colleagues too. But it's it's scary because you're wondering, you know, how you're getting this. Sometimes it happens to me on WhatsApp as well. It used to be more bitcoin messages, but now it's more of these kind of fake recruiting type messages.
Right.
But I like my current gig, so I'm going to try to keep that. But Lane, what safeguards do you think need to be put in place when this is such a complicated type of issue, and especially with all of the technology involved.
Right at the end of the day, common sense is probably the thing that I say to most people, the when you get something from somebody you don't know, and I get it all the time. In fact, while we were talking here, I think I got a spam call coming into my phone. Seriously, it's just every day. And just rule of thumb is if it's not from somebody you know, if it's not from the organization you're in,
you just don't click on it. Is enticing, as the headline might be, there's a lot of clickbait we see today, and at the end of the day, this is just going to become an ongoing thing. And again, our goal at Deep Instinct is to make it so that if there is a breach wherever they try to get at critical company data or critical company IP or resources, we will detect it and we will stop it and flack it.
So I'd like to think that even if the first line of defense, which is practical behavior by our employees and by individuals, deep instinct deep learning technology, I say it this way, it's the best AI to fight AI.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about that and sort of the technology that's being used here. Because one thing that I always wonder is who has the upper hand right now. Is it the actors who have incredible upside but also a lot of downside or is it the people who are trying to protect us who has more technological advantage right now?
Yeah, I hate to say it, particular in the AI space, IT advantage does goes to go to the bad actors. And one of the challenges is and one of the hardest jobs in cyber and n it is the CIO and the chief information security officer. These individuals have gone to the well to put in a tremendous amount of cyber protection and detection technology for number of years, and
even still ransomwares and attackers get through. And it's getting even more challenging the pace at which the malicious acts are taking place and the ability for the teams of people within enterprises and governments can address them. The gap is widening, and so again the bad actors have the advantage.
And now the challenge that a lot of the IT professionals have is they have to once again go to management say this is a continuing and escalating this is probably one of the most difficult jobs in technology, the cyber protection, and it's only going to get greater and so I encourage organizations to not think about, well, what are we going to replace in our tech stack to justify the cost of prevention. My view is that this is a budget line that unfortunately continues to be need
to be evaluated. But more importantly, these practitioners need to go beyond the technologies they've been using and look at the more sophisticated technologies such as the things that we we provide a deep Instinct because the same old tools aren't going to work against the bad actors. Eventually, the chech catches up early on. It's a challenge.
Lane, appreciate you joining us. That's Lane Best CEO over at Deep Instinct. He joins us from New York.
As you know, Tim, this is a really big issue here when you're thinking about how women are continuing, unfortunately to lose these C suite seats in corporate America. In fact, women's representation in senior level positions at US companies saw signs of fatigue for the first time in two decades, with gender parity and C suite positions potentially not reaching parody until twenty seventy two, according to an S and P report earlier this year.
That's literally a lifetime.
Yes, that's a lifetime. I will probably be dead that hopefully hopefully not hopefully not that hopefully not though, But anyway, I digress. But while there are lingering issues affecting women's abilities to seek, prepare, and attain business leadership positions, there actually are some signs recently of progress, and the total number of women enrolled in top full time NBA proms
this fall by a record setting pace. Here So, joining us now to discuss more is Alyssa sayingster ceo a fort Foundation from San Antonio, Texas and for some insight for our listeners. Forte Foundation is a nonprofit designed to increase opportunities for women in leadership through access to business education and professional development. Thank you so much, Alissa for joining us. And I was looking through this latest report
that y'all put together. Here walk us through some of the highlights and what drove women's NBA enrollment this fall.
Sure, so, I mean we're seeing some great results. We are seeing women at right now forty two percent enrolled in top business schools and that has been increasing, I believe over the last five years we've seen a four percent increase. We've seen number of schools reach gender parity. Eight of our schools have hit that fifty to fifty or more mark. But we've also seen some great progress at forty five percent and at forty percent.
And looking through this too, because there's a lot of interesting points here, and of course Tim and I were just mentioning some of the pitfalls. I mean, what do you think before was really holding back some of that, because I know COVID was a big issue where we saw a lot of women having to pull back from the workforce.
Sure, I think you know, there's a lot of choices that people had, men and women when they were going back to school during the COVID times. So it's a big move and it's a big investment, and you have
to really think about all the factors. What we saw about twenty years ago is that women were not pursuing business school because they didn't have a lot of role models, They didn't hear from people who influenced them that that was a path they should pursue, and so there were a number of other factors, but those things were holding
them back. And that's what we've been working on the last twenty years is how to chip away at some of those misperceptions they had about business school and business careers.
You know, I hesitate to tie everything to the election, but it's top of mind for so many people here. Tuesday is election day, and the US could see its first female president in its entire history. It also could not. But I'm wondering if you think a change at the top, and I literally mean at the top, like the most important position in the entire country, if that moves the needle.
It I mean, I think it absolutely does, because it is a change in potential policies, it's a change in who you see every day on your television. It's inspirational. I mean, that is the role model for everyone. And so I think you know why it may not inspire more women to go to get their business degree. I think it does inspire them to lead, and I think ultimately that's the position you want to see a woman in.
There's also something happening right now that we've been hearing
a lot about in the context of the election. Then that's the idea that more women are going to college, more women are graduating from college, and that even though as a whole, women are still at a paid less than men, there's this idea that when it comes to advancement, and this is a lot of been talked about this with regard to the male support for Donald Trump, there's this idea that men have been left back, and I'm sorry that I'm it's hard for me to say that
with a straight face, just because you look at all the data and you see that women are still on a salary basis. You know, there's like equal payday as months after the first of the year. So but I'm wondering how you see that playing into this. Melissa Well, I think.
It's discouraging when you hear that as a top line message, because I think you're right. Maybe for a blink of the eye, we've seen change happen and women have progressed. But I think if you look back decades and centuries, we're just now getting to the tip of the iceberg. And so so I'm not sure that there's a lot
to complain about on either side. I think we just need to kind of let things settle, and we need to make sure that we're focused on, especially in business leadership, building inclusive cultures, building opportunities for all of our people to advance, and to make sure that companies are focused on that, and they're focused on, you know, how to
engage all of their employees. In this discussion, I think it's an unnecessary really to say men are not advancing at the same rate as women, especially in business leadership. I mean, there are some other societal things that we want to focus on, and I don't want men to be left behind, But I also don't think that's really reflective of what's going on.
Of course, there was a debate, especially over the last decade, as more and more people were getting their MBAs and how much useful that would be as people were getting say CFAs and other things. But when you're looking more recently, especially coming out of COVID, how have especially women been putting their nbas to work in particular industries.
Well, I think what you see is a really healthy pipeline of women with their MBA, And what that typically means is you're going to see strong outcomes in the consulting industry and financial services, in consumer package goods companies, and in technology. I mean, those are kind of the
four top recruiters that are coming to NBA campuses. It also means that more women are going to be starting their own businesses because they're going to be going through these incubators that are on these business school campuses, and that's really encouraging as well, given the lack of funding in VC. You want to see more companies being started by women and being successfully funded, And.
Are you starting to see that in the data as well as far as starting their own companies.
I mean, we're definitely seeing women advance. I mean, so we've been doing this work for twenty years and I think you're seeing them just becoming eligible for these very senior C suite positions. So I do think there is
a robust pipeline. I think companies do have to continue being intentional about how they advance all of their employees and are they providing career roadmaps and ways for women to advance and making sure again that they're focused on that culture and really engaging all of their potential leaderships in that conversation very transparently about how they see them progressing to the top.
And ultimately, I mean, we only have about thirty seconds left, But what do you think really needs to change in order for this to accelerate here and change things?
Well, I think in business school, I mean we're getting very close to parody, and so I would say the big thing that needs to change is once those women have graduated, how are we making sure that their advancement is possible. There's a lot more shoots than ladders in a women's career, and we want to make sure that they're given those ladders to continue climbing and excelling.
Thanks so much for joining us. Really great insight into all things, and especially such an important topic and great question from Tim about obviously at the top and how that could potentially change things here. But Alyssa Thankster, CEO of Forte Foundation, joining us from San Antonio, Texas. Great getting your insight on all of this.
But Tim, I'm sorry the electric just top of I mean, it's a great.
Great point though as far as like, does that change the dynamic when we're at the top though
It's I mean, I think a lot of people argue it's all about representation, that's right,