Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
There's so much to talk about right now on this Friday, whether it's in the markets or just broader company news right now. But one thing I did want to talk about is cybersecurity, Scarlett. I mean, cybersecurity is becoming increasingly more important, especially as we see a lot of online threats ramping up and honestly getting more and more creative.
Yeah, not a day goes by that you don't hear about a country or a company getting hacked by someone or some band of people. And you know, at a consumer level, obviously it's very concerning when you've got everything in your email or in your phone.
Absolutely with us to talk about this in more is Vincent Palette. He's CEO of gen Digital, which trades on the NASDAC underticker ge IN. You may be familiar with one of its brands, Norton, but we are joined by Vincent from Belgium. Actually, Vincent tell us a little bit about the current landscape right now as we think about protection from CyberSecure threads.
Yeah, as you've mentioned, the threat landscape is very dynamic at a high level now, all enabled by AI, which really increased the complexity of the threat, the sophistication of the thread the threads and becoming very difficult to detect. And you mentioned that the enterprise are being attacked, but
the enterprise are protecting themselves more and more. So, who is less vulnerable in the middle is the consumer and whether it's a deep thig, a scam, fishing, leveraging your data that they've been breached somewhere else and then capturing that to create some damages. The overall damages for the consumers in the US alone is over fifteen billion dollars and growing double digit these days.
Pretty incredible growth rate there.
What are the most common ways that people find their data their personal data compromised and what are some of the more unusual ways in which it happens.
I would say that today eighty percent of the threat
facing consumers are scam or social engineerings. And it's about collecting a vast amount of personal data that you have in the digital world, whe was it you know it, you put them on your own social media websites, or whether those data have been breaches as part of you shopping online or shopping into a different environment, and then the data is being captured sold in the dark web, and now with AI tools, very sophisticated personalized emails or
text are full in consumers. We've detected last quarter over one hundred and forty thousand websites that mimic real brand website driven by AI, but actually are just meant to capture and create financial damages for consumers.
How is Gen Digital leveraging AI just to push productivity forward at the company as we think about it in relation to cybersecurity.
As a topic of the day of course, right, So not only is the AI is a threat from being used by hackers a threat for consumers, but we also add Gen Digital using AI to protect our consumers. So we're the first one to come with the full model for anti scam and being able to detect real time scams as they hit either your text, your voice or
your emails. And now we embedding that more into cheap manufacturers to create deep fake solutions and really making sure we can detect what's the problem of the day, what's the reality? Is this message real or not? Is this video real or not? It's this voice real or not? And we heavily investing into moving our over threat protection into an AI powered threat thread detection.
So, in terms of companies and consumers spending on protection from the cybersecurity threats, what have you observed so far in twenty twenty five. You know, we know that earning the season has gone pretty well for most companies.
You have just reported results as well.
Your second quarter just VPS beat anless estimates by a penny and your second quarter revenue coming in slightly higher than what was anticipated. Are companies growing their spending on cybersecurity at a stable rate or has that picked up? Do you see them pulling back a little bit if the economy starts going south a bit.
No, Definitely, people are investing more into making sure that the defense is becoming more and more sophisticated to address the over threat landscape. You've seen our report. You mentioned that we had another outstanding quarter beaten race here in Q two that followed another beat and race in Q one.
As we're developing not only the protection of security, but enable the consumer to be secure, to be private, to also manage the identity and their reputations, we are expanding the pie if you want, and that has enabled us to post it another quota at about twenty five percent growth, which the help of our most recent acquisition, which is leading into the financial wellness. As you protect your data,
you want to protect your financial position. You also want to help consumer manage and grow that position.
So we're headed into the holiday season, do you all tend to see any sort of uptick in terms of cybersecurity threads or maybe identity theft even and if so, how can consumers protect themselves.
It's definitely a higher risk season. Obviously, everybody wants to go out and shop more, dine more, and that's at every point in time you're exposing you personal data out. So we constantly educate our customers to make sure that these days they are really controlling where do they put their credit cards, which website they go and shop from, and making sure they use our anti scan detection tools and models to make sure we can detect where the
risk is. But definitely we advise everyone to be cautious. These days, harkers are out there and trying to collect you personal digital footprint.
Does people's infatuation with.
Cryptocurrency, bitcoin, digital wallets, does that increase the likelihood that they might be a target of of cyber attacks.
I would say that the overall penetration of your digital footprint, your life becoming more and more a digital life, and the middle of payments that you mentioned is just another sign of moving more online, which then creates, of course also more risk to be to be to be to be attacked. So the overall trend is to move more online in many different dimensions, including uh the method of payments.
What's your strategy for rebuilding or maintaining trust at a time where cybersecurity failures continue to make headlines.
And it's not only cybersecurity failure, it's only also a time where with a I it's difficult to detect what's reality and what's a fake. So so there're still a reality we're discussing and so definitely trying to making sure we equip our consumers in our tools with deep fake detection and ability to really see what is produced by a machine use what is a natural piece of content is an important needs that we're trying to address.
All right, good stuff.
Really appreciate your joining us today with your recap of your results and to give us kind of the overview of what it looks like here in the cyber security space. Vincent Palette is chairman and CEO of Gen Digital