I recently attended the annual Hacks & Hops event hosted by FRSecure in St. Paul last week at beautiful Allianz Field. Featuring a wide range of speakers and event sponsors, Hacks and Hops has been a long-standing opportunity for cybersecurity professionals to network and share insights about emerging threats within the cybersecurity landscape.
The event this year had a common thread of addressing Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI tools and how they impact a company's cybersecurity program. Across all the speakers, the topic of how to leverage LLMs to support the ongoing security objectives of a company was embedded in each topic. In addition, a good deal of time was spent discussing the potential negative ramifications of irresponsible adoption of AI tools within a company's development lifecycle.
The standout speaker was Dr. Anmol Agarwal and her discussion around the protection of consumer data privacy rights when using LLMs. Her lecture highlighted the importance of using Federated Learning to ensure that information protected by privacy regulations is isolated from larger models and secured within a controlled environment. In addition, her insights into homomorphic encryption engaged the entire audience, generating questions and commentary throughout the event. The concept of an LLM running computation on encrypted data without decrypting it first sparked several discussions about how it could be practically implemented in several different scenarios.
Each speaker contributed valuable insights ranging from techniques to more closely align engineers and developers in the cybersecurity process to opportunities provided by AI tools to enhance threat hunting across the enterprise. Capped off by a panel discussion, the event offered cybersecurity professionals and laymen alike the opportunity to ask questions and receive more tailored advice for their specific scenarios from industry leaders.
Ultimately, the core message of this event was around the impact of AI and LLMs on the cybersecurity landscape. Ranging from new tools and techniques available to leverage the benefits of AI within your organization's cybersecurity to some of the ways AI has evolved the threat landscape, the topics at this event always came back to this central point. It has been obvious for years that there would be a significant impact, but its year-over-year impacts are important to continue to assess and Hacks & Hops provides this opportunity.
