RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Thursday morning at CED’s Venture Connect started off with the Cyber/Secure Tech session. Cybersecurity is a booming market, with $300+ billion spent annually. But there are many open positions in the industry and management of security issues has remained a challenge for many companies.

AI to support security and reduce “alert fatigue”

According to Trevor Gingras, co-founder and COO of Salem Cyber, 90% of security alerts go uninvestigated. While there’s automation in the detection process, analyzing alerts continues to be a mostly manual – and frequently time-consuming – process.

“There’s an asymmetric relationship between automated detection and manual analysis,” said Gingras in his pitch. “That leads to a huge disparity between the volume of alerts and the capacity of the team to actually investigate them.”

Salem Cyber wants to solve this problem by bringing AI to the analyzation process. The tool investigates alerts, taking context into consideration, then passes the most relevant and critical threats to humans to examine further.

Gingras was clear that this tool is intended to support staff and try to address burnout and turnover that comes from “alert fatigue.” AI might be taking jobs, but it won’t be taking over the Cybersecurity industry just yet.

“To be very clear, our goal is to augment – and not to replace – human analysts,” said Gingras.

What a startup show: Behind the scenes at the biggest-ever Venture Connect

Risk Intelligence insights

Jon Sternstein, founder and CEO of Stern Security, also sees room in the Cyber marketplace for automation improvements. 

Sternstein founded Stern Security 8 years ago. As he and his team worked with clients they noticed that even with all the technology out there, examination of threats was still being done in spreadsheets. When Sternstein went looking for a tool to quickly and accurately evaluate risk, he realized they’d found a hole in the market – and Velocity was born. 

“If you can’t accurately measure risk then any type of intelligence you build on top of that is completely pointless,” said Sternstein.

Velocity is intended to examine security data and more accurately assess risks, both internal and from third-party sources. The tool then offers actionable data regarding how best to spend a company’s available security dollars.

Velocity has a subscription service as well as a freemium option for smaller companies and initial testing.