Black Hat USA 2024 | James Robinson | Netskope

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James Robinson

CISO

Netskope

Netskope weighs in as AI surge drives new CISO cybersecurity strategy

The rise of artificial intelligence has led to a much-needed rapid evolution of cybersecurity. It means a new CISO cybersecurity strategy being more comfortable with risk and seeking out better C-suite alignment, according to recent research from Netskope Inc.There’s no question that AI investment is growing fast. It’s the first year that investment is actually flowing into projects, according to James Robinson (pictured), chief information security officer of Netskope.James Robinson of Netskope talks with theCUBE about the new CISO cybersecurity strategy

play_circle_outline Discussion on AI investment, corporate adoption, and data handling in organizations

play_circle_outline Focus on threat reports, cloud security, AI growth, and autonomous business

play_circle_outline Enhancing Industry Resilience: Involving CISO in Decision-Making Amid Regulatory Concerns

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James Robinson | Netskope

James Robinson

CISO Netskope

The largest cybersecurity show in the world, Netskope's James discusses AI growth, corporate investments, and the challenges of leveraging AI in cybersecurity. The conversation delves into the implications of AI on business autonomy and the opportunities and challenges of using AI in cybersecurity programs, notably in distinguishing between creators and consumers of AI technology. The importance of AI governance, privacy laws, and regulatory landscapes are highlighted, as well as the need for CISOs to understand threat reports and use them as a form of intel ... Read more

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What is the current state of investment and use of AI in companies and organizations? add

What is the significance of having a pulse on the industry and trends in order to pivot a program accordingly? add

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James Robinson | Netskope

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon cybersecurity fam, and welcome back to Black Hat. We're here in fabulous Las Vegas for one of our many shows, but this one is very special. We're here at the largest cybersecurity show in the world. And I am particularly delighted for this next segment because we're going to be digging into threat reports and a lot of the life in cyber for CISO. So please welcome James to our segment. James, thanks so much for being here with us. Thank you.

James Robinson

>> Thank you. Happy I can make it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

James Robinson

>> Busy week.

Savannah Peterson

>> This has got to be a busy week for you. You wear a lot of hats this week.

James Robinson

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> Tell me about those hats and tell us a little bit about Netskope just in case folks aren't aware.

James Robinson

>> So Netskope been around for about 11 years. I've been here for six, started as deputy CISO and now the CISO internally. And really the focus for us is cloud security, all things cloud security as you're a hybrid worker or as you're on-prem, those things are now the new normal and everything. And with that comes data and threats. We see it happen every single day. People getting attacked and not only from the insider. People still believe that sometimes their data is their data and so they want to take it. And then other times, obviously, they're getting phishing emails and things like that still, and we still see that a lot.

Savannah Peterson

>> Millions of them, which is absolutely crazy. Y'all just published a threat report with some really exciting data that I've been chewing on this afternoon. Can you give us some of the highlights?

James Robinson

>> Yeah, so we're seeing just AI growth like crazy, think everyone is.

Savannah Peterson

>> Madness. 28 billion I read in the report, been invested in the last four years. That is a metric, I'm not going to swear, but large ton of capital.

James Robinson

>> Lots.

Savannah Peterson

>> That is going in there. And most companies making that investment. What else do they know what to do with it?

James Robinson

>> So I think right now we're still very early into it. So a lot of it is R&D projects. This is the first year that we're actually seeing the investment of money go into the corporate side. So everyone has projects now. Last year was playing around. This year is actually projects. Let's take this AI and let's use it. And so we're seeing that just expansion of the ecosystem that's meeting that demand as all these projects now are starting to get kicked off inside of these organizations. And so with that, people are trying to figure out what do we do with this data? How do we handle it? How do we leverage it? How do we leverage the services? How do we do these new things that are really supposed to unlock? A couple of years ago, I remember doing some research and I had a talk on it and it was, where are we going? As a world, where are we going? And it was autonomous business.

Savannah Peterson

>> Not bold at all. That's the meaning of life. Where are we going?

James Robinson

>> It was like, "How do we get there?" And it was like, "Well, business is going to be autonomous, autonomous business." And AI is a key factor in getting to the autonomous business, so how do we get that?

Savannah Peterson

>> I hadn't even thought about that.

James Robinson

>> So it's like how does it operate in that way?

Savannah Peterson

>> Interesting.

James Robinson

>> And so we're just starting to see just the tip of it. It's just picking up and it's exciting. It's exciting to be part of. I hope I look back in 10 years and say, "Wow." I remember the first time I saw Google search and I was like, "Holy cow. That's amazing."

Savannah Peterson

>> You brought something up when we were chatting on that point that I really loved is, we've been here before. You and I are both longtime technologists and sports fans as it turns out, and we've seen a number of hype curves. Where do you think, and I know you're mentioning early, but how early are we on that adoption curve? Look at the market this week for example. There's a bit of a fallout happening. Investment realizing gains. We're in that delta right now, which is to be expected to your point, because it's R&D. But I'm very curious where you think we are exactly on that hype cycle.

James Robinson

>> I think we're starting to see, and I don't want to use the hype cycle terminology, but it's easy to do. But I think it's easy for us to start to say that we're just starting to see the opportunities that we can take advantage of or we can start to leverage. I'm seeing vendor pitches and organizations come to me and say, "Look what we can do. Look at what I can put together for you." And right now you have to use an analyst to do this. Before you had to do this all by hand and you had to throw team members at it or projects at it, not just one analyst at it. And now we're starting to see where this can actually just come out of the box and it can start to do things for you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

James Robinson

>> Which is really exciting. That's amazing. We've counted, even going back on the Orchestration side, one of our projects that we did internally, which you'd say, "Why are you talking about Orchestration?" Well, it all fits together because once you can start to orchestrate and you have those connections, then you can start to let AI reuse those same connections and you can start to do things. But we've had dozens of FTE savings time. Now this is an FTE that you would say, "I'm going to go hire someone for." This is an FTE of wasted time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right, getting that time back.

James Robinson

>> Getting the time back so you can respond faster. We're always trying to respond to a threat faster.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right. And be on the offense versus the reactionary do things.

James Robinson

>> Exactly. So how do you get there? Well, you have to build these data pipelines. You have to start to have this data in areas where you can actually get to it. You have to be able to start having all your automations in place. I still even say, you got to know what you're going to automate. You still got to know what you're going to apply AI to. So we're right at that early stage still where, especially GenAI, I think ML, AI, it's been around for a while.

Savannah Peterson

>> 20, 30 years. Right, this isn't new.

James Robinson

>> This isn't new on that side.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's the application thereof. And honestly, the ubiquitous adoption. Your data says something like 98% of companies are investing in AI right now, which tells me there's only more capital coming into the space. I'm curious, given your lens and you're looking across industries, where are you seeing traction happen fastest in these R&D projects?

James Robinson

>> Yeah. I think the first one that everyone looked at was how do I save time or money? How do I optimize? And I think there was an easy reason for CISOs to say yes to that because usually it was corporate data and corporate information. We weren't getting into, well now I'm handling customer data.

Savannah Peterson

>> Way more sensitive.

James Robinson

>> Yeah, way more sensitive. And so even for us in internally...

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a really good point....

James Robinson

>> it was much easier for us to go, "Oh, we want to optimize alert information and try to auto triage those." Well, that's alert information. That's a server that's speaking out saying, "Hey, I'm high on CPUs process right now." Or something like that. It has nothing to do with customer data. Those are very easy for us to take on and for us to also realize and understand and let our AI labs team also understand the uses there. At the same time, when we were internal, the one thing that we started building out ourselves was our AI governance. We started AI governance program three years ago internally.

Savannah Peterson

>> How hot is that right now?

James Robinson

>> Now it's huge.

Savannah Peterson

>> I bet that's a money maker for you.

James Robinson

>> I'm just trying to share it open source. I'm just trying to give it away to other folks. I talked to other CISOs, I'm like, "Where are you at? What doing?" Because this isn't something for us as a core that we're going to go sell as a service. Something like that. I just want everyone to be able to understand it so then they can govern themselves and they can adopt it better and faster.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think we all have better AI and we can have better systems and you can be a better service provider.

James Robinson

>> No, we don't have the craziness also. That you have a massive AI breach, but then it stifles the industry. It hurts us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Of course.

James Robinson

>> Which is the other thing that happens if you don't have those guardrails in place. That's the other part of it. So I think there's another part. We were talking earlier and I forgot to mention this. But I think organizations and CISOs have to understand, are you a creator? Or are you going to just be an adopter and a user? And I think there's different landscapes and different lenses. You have to look at your program and understand that piece in. If you're going to be a creator, you have to have different guardrails in place and you have to approach the problem differently than being a technology consumer and using it for another type of benefit.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that nuance. I can imagine there's a lot involved in the process of a company even establishing if they are a creator or a consumer. I think a lot of people want to be creators, but it's not always the best move for a company. What percentage of folks do you find in both of those camps? How are you coaching them through that? What are those conversations like?

James Robinson

>> So it's hard to give a percentage. I think a lot of folks feel that they have creator groups. And it's still early because the technology is still rapidly developing. If I would ask six months ago how many people have a project that is trying to create your own LLMs? It was no one.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was going to say, Meta maybe.

James Robinson

>> Right. There was no one that was doing it. Now you hear people talking about, and even in our own governance, we saw this happen really rapidly where it was, I want to use a service. Now I want to use an LLM. Now I want to use an SLM. Now I want to train it. Now I want to build my own. And it rapidly changed and that happened. My governance program couldn't even keep up with it. I was just trying to keep up with that so I could give good guidance to the teams and rapidly going through over and over and over. It's exciting at the end of the day, right? Wow, this is a creative...

Savannah Peterson

>> We're moving so fast. Innovation is moving so fast. I love that.

James Robinson

>> But a lot of companies haven't started to think about it from that side. I would say if you're not thinking about it and you're really not looking at it from that side, you're probably a consumer. If you're not being challenged by your groups of how to create your own AI and your own GenAI, not just use something and put it into your product set, then you're probably more a consumer. And then you just got to look for the shadow and you got to look for those guardrails that are in place where data's moving. Where if you're a creator, then you have to start really understanding some of the privacy laws. Where's the regulatory landscape headed?

Savannah Peterson

>> Way more cognitive load to a degree in that regard across your development team and everybody else. No, it's a lot more. I love that we were chatting about it before we went live today, talking about these threat reports. And we get hit with them as journalists all the time like I was telling you. And I love it. I love chewing up the data. But I'm curious because there's a lot of them that go out, what's your advice for folks on how to use these?

James Robinson

>> It's tough. So when I was an analyst, I used to read through every single one, have every single line detailed, highlighted. I knew it. Then change. Got to get into leadership a little more. Now I needed to be synthesized a little bit more. Then get into CISO role. Now I'm like, give me the point. And a lot of times I'll look at these reports and this is what I advise others on. Look at the report, understand it, drive conversation with your peers, see where your peers are at on the position, just like you're saying, "Hey, how many of you are looking at it being a consumer versus a creator?" Have those conversations and drive it out with the data points behind it. And then that basically can then set a better stage for you strategically, for you to have a conversation then give better counsel and advice to your organization and your other leaders. Whereas before, when I look at every single point, I'd say, "Oh, I need to go and I need to look for a tactic because 78% of the time something's happening." So I'm going to go internally, I'm going to dig into the data.

Savannah Peterson

>> So it's more about umbrella scope of what's the state of the landscape? How can we evaluate our potential risks and vulnerabilities and make sure that we're providing the best service?

James Robinson

>> Well use it almost as another form of intel. Where's the market heading, let's just say. Where is the industry and the trends heading? And do I need to start pivoting my program and look at it? It's very difficult when you say, "Okay, here's what we're going to do in a year. Here's what we're going to do in three years." To pivot your program midway through. But if you look out and you have those conversations with some of your peers, then you're able to say, "Okay, I need to start shifting my program this way," because this is either something that's a strategic guideline that I'm going to have to follow, or this is something tactical that this is going to show up right now and it's going to be a problem. So you can start to shape it. Internally, we start looking at the very specific attacks and threats and those types of things. Bring those in and then say, "Okay, do we have the capabilities to recreate these?" Obviously, because on a team I need that capability. But where is it going? We know there's going to be continued threats and attacks, so how do we also build our program to be able to be counterintuitive to those or to take a look at those and say, "Okay, we need to be responsive. I need to be on this. I need to have my pulse of what's going on within the country."

Savannah Peterson

>> It's like a control plane pulse essentially of the industry, which is really important. That single plane of observability even just on the industry, I think is really vital. So it makes perfect sense. You also did something interesting in this threat report. You had a special section for CISOs and it's the first time.

James Robinson

>> It was the first time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Tell me about that.

James Robinson

>> Yeah. We were having a conversation, Ray who writes a report, we were having a conversation, I think it was at Arsene. He said, "We have a threat report that we're building. We'd love to get a CISO perspective." CISO perspective? Why would you want that in a threat report? He said, "Because sometimes I don't know, really, am I hitting the mark for that type of audience or for a leadership type of audience." And so that was what we did in this one was we actually built that section out and we said, "Hey, inside of this threat report, let's try to bubble it up a little bit. Let's try to give some guidance on how should you use the report."

Savannah Peterson

>> And why not? To your point, you don't have to read it like a research analyst. Why not give the tone of education and advice?

James Robinson

>> Or even I gave a little bit of a flip side to it. I gave a little bit of a, don't even worry about the content of it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Almost a counter perspective.

James Robinson

>> The counter perspective of it, which was, if you're not able to read through this and you just hit that one point, think about it like this. Think about where things are headed, and again, use it. Talk to peers. Talk to others. If you're not able to read this, give this report to your team. Let them read it, give you the roll-up report of it. Or some high notes that you should follow. But other than that, if you hit that part as a leader, it can give you a different whole different perspective on what was written in there.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. No, I think that's great. And it helps with the digestion of all of that information, which I think is really imperative, especially right now with the amount of input we all receive.

James Robinson

>> Yeah, well that's the problem with the threat reports. It's so much. It can be so much information that comes in, you almost have to have a team.

Savannah Peterson

>> What's wrong with that?

James Robinson

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> How do I discern this? No, I think it's really great that y'all are doing that, and I'm honestly not surprised. Last question for you because we could talk all day, and I know it's a busy week for you. What do you hope, because you've been a fabulous guest, what do you hope to be able to say the next time we're at Black Hat sitting down chatting that you can't yet say today?

James Robinson

>> Oh, that's a good one. I would hope that we don't have a major breach inside of an AI system that holds us back. I think that the technology is so amazing. And I think it's very important for us to understand and adopt a technology within the US, within the world. And you can see even how different countries, the reports on how they're using AI differently than even the US and such. And I think that if we have a major setback, that's going to be a big problem. So I hope that different security programs and security leaders are able, and honestly, businesses are listening to their CISOs and saying, "Help me to get to here." And bringing the CISO along with that, because if not, and we do have a major setback, it's a setback for the entire industry. And that's what I worry. And then what you start to see is you start to see the tailing regulations that are going to come in that then are going to basically hold back the technology in the industry as well. So that's the biggest thing that I hope that if we get to do this again next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> We will.

James Robinson

>> We don't have one of those things that that's what we're discussing because I think that will be really, really bad for everything and really the opportunity of the technology. And that goes for any technology. If you can adopt it and you can understand it and allow it to take place with some guardrails, there's definitely guardrails you need.

Savannah Peterson

>> Of course.

James Robinson

>> You don't have to hold it back.

Savannah Peterson

>> I really love that point. I love that you're essentially saying you hope there isn't some sort of catastrophe that's detrimental to the overall technological movement that's happening right here, because it's going to be largely beneficial.

James Robinson

>> It's going to be huge for decades.

Savannah Peterson

>> For all of us. I think you're our only guest from Indianapolis this week. Is there anyone you'd like to give a shout-out to in Indy today?

James Robinson

>> Oh, my family, by far. They're starting high school this week.

Savannah Peterson

>> Huge.

James Robinson

>> I got two in high school.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my God. Congrats dad. That's a big deal.

James Robinson

>> We used to always come out. Little inside. My wife and I have our anniversary right around this time, and so we used to always spend it here. And my wife is in cybersecurity as well. That's where we met.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow, well done, mate. Well done.

James Robinson

>> So we used to always come out here and do our anniversary out here, which is a little weird.

Savannah Peterson

>> It can be fun.

James Robinson

>> It was fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> Great shows, great food. It's not all the debauchery.

James Robinson

>> Add a weekend to it. Definitely want to say that. And then there's a great CISO community and security community within Indy. It's only only a million or so people there, but we have a really good community, so I want to say hello to all them.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I absolutely love it. A happy anniversary, James.

James Robinson

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> To you and your wife and the fam. Congrats to the kids. It's so exciting.

James Robinson

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my gosh, what a big week and yeah. Wow. What fun. And cheers to the Indy community. I'm a big fan of smaller communities. I live in the Silicon Valley, but my family's from Minnesota, so I've got a little bit of a Midwest bias and soft spot for sure. And always want to make sure those communities know they're elevated and cared about.

James Robinson

>> Don't fly over. Stop on through.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's the spirit, James. Thank you so much for being here on the show with us.

James Robinson

>> Happy be here. Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> This is absolutely fantastic. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fantastic two days of coverage here at Black Hat in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for cybersecurity news.