Rachel James, AbbVie: Harnessing AI for corporate cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is within the midst of a recent arms race, and the highly effective weapon of alternative on this new period is AI.

AI gives a basic double-edged sword: a robust defend for defenders and a potent new device for these with malicious intent. Navigating this complicated battleground requires a gradual hand and a deep understanding of each the know-how and the individuals who would abuse it.

To get a view from the entrance traces, AI Information caught up with Rachel James, Principal AI ML Risk Intelligence Engineer at international biopharmaceutical firm AbbVie.

“Along with the in-built AI augmentation that has been vendor-provided in our present instruments, we additionally use LLM evaluation on our detections, observations, correlations and related guidelines,” James explains.

James and her staff are utilizing massive language fashions to sift by a mountain of safety alerts, searching for patterns, recognizing duplicates, and discovering harmful gaps of their defences earlier than an attacker can.

“We use this to find out similarity, duplication and supply hole evaluation,” she provides, noting that the following step is to weave in much more exterior risk knowledge. “We want to improve this with the combination of risk intelligence in our subsequent section.”

Central to this operation is a specialised risk intelligence platform known as OpenCTI, which helps them construct a unified image of threats from a sea of digital noise.

AI is the engine that makes this cybersecurity effort potential, taking huge portions of jumbled, unstructured textual content and neatly organising it into a regular format generally known as STIX. The grand imaginative and prescient, James says, is to make use of language fashions to attach this core intelligence with all different areas of their safety operation, from vulnerability administration to third-party danger.

Benefiting from this energy, nevertheless, comes with a wholesome dose of warning. As a key contributor to a serious business initiative, James is aware of the pitfalls.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the work of an exquisite group of parents I’m part of – the ’OWASP Top 10 for GenAI’ as a foundational manner of understanding vulnerabilities that GenAI can introduce,” she says.

Past particular vulnerabilities, James factors at three basic trade-offs that enterprise leaders should confront:

1. Accepting the danger that comes with the inventive however usually unpredictable nature of generative AI.
2. The lack of transparency in how AI reaches its conclusions, an issue that solely grows because the fashions change into extra complicated.
3. The hazard of poorly judging the actual return on funding for any AI undertaking, the place the hype can simply result in overestimating the advantages or underestimating the trouble required in such a fast-moving discipline.

To construct a greater cybersecurity posture within the AI period, it’s a must to perceive your attacker. That is the place James’ deep experience comes into play.

“That is truly my specific experience – I’ve a cyber risk intelligence background and have performed and documented in depth analysis into risk actor’s curiosity, use, and improvement of AI,” she notes.

James actively tracks adversary chatter and gear improvement by open-source channels and her personal automated collections from the darkish internet, sharing her findings on her cybershujin GitHub. Her work additionally includes getting her personal palms soiled.

“Because the lead for the Immediate Injection entry for OWASP, and co-author of the Information to Pink Teaming GenAI, I additionally spend time growing adversarial enter strategies myself and preserve a community of specialists additionally on this discipline,” James provides.

So, what does this all imply for the way forward for the business? For James, the trail ahead is obvious. She factors to a captivating parallel she found years in the past: “The cyber risk intelligence lifecycle is nearly an identical to the information science lifecycle foundational to AI ML programs.”

This alignment is an enormous alternative. “Surely, when it comes to the datasets we are able to function with, defenders have a novel probability to capitalise on the ability of intelligence knowledge sharing and AI,” she asserts.

Her last message gives each encouragement and a warning for her friends within the cybersecurity world: “Information science and AI shall be part of each cybersecurity skilled’s life shifting ahead, embrace it.”

Rachel James shall be sharing her insights at this 12 months’s AI & Big Data Expo Europe in Amsterdam on 24-25 September 2025. Make sure to try her day two presentation on ‘From Precept to Observe – Embedding AI Ethics at Scale’.

See additionally: Google Cloud unveils AI ally for security teams

Need to be taught extra about AI and large knowledge from business leaders? Try AI & Big Data Expo happening in Amsterdam, California, and London. The excellent occasion is co-located with different main occasions together with Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

Discover different upcoming enterprise know-how occasions and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The submit Rachel James, AbbVie: Harnessing AI for corporate cybersecurity appeared first on AI News.