Sophos Report: IT Leaders Struggle with AI Risks and Costs in Cybersecurity

Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyberattacks today released a new report, “Beyond the Hype: The Businesses Reality of AI for Cybersecurity,” which surveyed 400 IT leaders on their use of AI in security.

The survey found that, despite 65% having adopted generative artificial intelligence [GenAI capabilities, 89% of IT leaders are concerned that flaws in GenAI cybersecurity tools could put their organization at risk.

Additionally, according to new Sophos X-Ops research, “Cybercriminals Still Not Getting on Board the AI Train [Yet],” also released today, there has been a slight but noteworthy shift in the way cybercriminals use AI.

After investigating several underground forums, Sophos X-Ops found that, while there’s still skepticism about GenAI, some criminals are using it to automate mundane tasks, such as crafting bulk emails and analyzing data. Others are incorporating it into spam and social engineering toolkits.

“As with many other things in life, the mantra should be ‘trust but verify’ regarding generative AI tools. We have not actually taught the machines to think; we have simply provided them with the context to speed up the processing of large quantities of data,” said Chester Wisniewski, director, global field CTO, Sophos.

“The potential of these tools to accelerate security workloads is amazing, but it still requires the context and comprehension of their human overseers for this benefit to be realized.”

With some form of AI embedded in the cybersecurity infrastructure of 98% of organizations surveyed, IT leaders expressed concern about potential over-reliance on AI, with 87% of respondents stating they were concerned about a resulting lack of cybersecurity accountability.

GenAI and Reducing Burnout

Different-sized organizations expressed different priorities for utilizing GenAI. While large organizations [those with more than 1,000 employees] are prioritizing improved protection, respondents with 50-99 employees rated reducing burnout as their top desired benefit from GenAI tools.

However, complicating matters, across all sizes of organizations, 84% of leaders surveyed said they were concerned about pressure to reduce cybersecurity professional headcount due to unrealistic expectations about AI’s abilities to replace human operators.

Other Key Findings from the “Beyond the Hype” Report:

Costs of GenAI Are Hard to Quantify: 75% of IT leaders agree that the costs of GenAI in cybersecurity products are hard to quantify.

Companies Are Counting on Savings from GenAI: While 80% of IT leaders believe that GenAI will significantly increase the cost of cybersecurity tools, most organizations believe GenAI offers a path to lowering overall cybersecurity expenditure with 87% of respondents believing the savings of GenAI will offset the costs.