The Problem

We all know it. Each of us can feel it gnawing at the back of our minds. It’s there every time someone mentions another data breach. Social Security Numbers, banking information, passwords… again. When we check and still have money in our bank accounts, we move on. What else can you do? It goes away for a while until some non-technical person shows you an astoundingly useful app they generated in an hour with some new tool. If a well-intentioned person who’s never coded can create something this powerful… what will happen next?

This AI age is as exciting as it is scary. Since companies with household names and large security teams can’t protect themselves, what hope do we have against these new apex AI predators? Some say Cybersecurity will become a thing of the past as AI fights AI. And no doubt that will be a part of it. But, that can’t be the full answer because AI hasn’t solved the problem. The origin of all technological security issues is identity. The presence of a vulnerability is meaningless if there are none with the malicious intent to exploit it. Consider the first security device: Caesar’s two-ringed cipher. It created the ability to split people into two groups: those who could read encoded messages and those who could not. Fast forward two thousand years and we find the identical principle at work in modern computing. The problem isn’t the encoded message or the code being executed on a company’s cloud hardware, the problem is entirely who. Who is reading the message and who is executing that command? And most importantly, what is their intent? As powerful as AI is, it cannot accurately detect motive. Headlines are clear: Cybercrime is winning and even now we have security tools with mature AI detections built into them, and we’re still losing. Cybersecurity isn’t working.

It’s time to change how the game is played.

The Solution

What if you could solve this problem of identity to a reasonable conclusion? Perfection? Of course not. But within acceptable limits. What if you could secure and audit your company so well, even AI-backed malicious actors would likely give up before being able to inflict damage? If identity were no longer the fatal issue because the door is truly shut, the entries guarded, and there is truly no one in here who is not supposed to be. The way ahead has much to discover and explore, but why are we forsaking what we’ve already learned. Ironclad, ancient IT concepts should be reforged into today’s brash new age. Where are the champions who shout “Victory belongs to the most tenacious”?

We don’t know what brought you here or what motivates your company, but here’s what drives us. The simple belief that security does not exist to serve itself; it protects innocence. The literal translation of the Japanese word “Samurai” is servant to nobility. This is key. What does protecting the trustful innocence of a business look like? Humility, learning, inconvenience, hardening, loving AI, testing, patience, auditing, documenting, tearing down insecure business practices, hating AI, apologizing, begging for budget, teaching, leaving old IT paradigms behind, embracing resistance, maturing SIEMs and networks and people to fight Cyber criminals and the apex predators of today and tomorrow. In short, charging full-force into the battlefields where security needs to be fought. And this is not without reward. In those fleeting moments of calm at the front lines, we glance back and see HR, Finance, IT, and others… safe. Business as it should be, unaware of us. Trustful innocence, and our joy.

Welcome to Cyber Samurai