Abnormal CEO Evan Reiser on AI-Powered Cybersecurity With the New York Stock Exchange

T: Abnormal Security is a cybersecurity company specializing in email security and threat detection. They use a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and mitigate advanced email threats, including phishing, business email compromise, and other malicious activities. Joining me now to talk more about this is the co-founder and CEO, Evan Riser, all the way from San Francisco, California. Hi, Evan. Thanks for joining me today.

E: Hi, Trinity. Great to see you again. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

T: Absolutely. Now let's start by talking about Abnormal Security's platform and how it's designed to provide real-time protection to help organizations to safeguard their email communications.

E: Sounds great. Well, first of all, Abnormal is an AI-native cybersecurity company. We help customers protect against the full spectrum of email attacks. Those are things like email, business email compromise, vendor fraud, credential phishing, and we have a really unique approach that helps, stop attacks by using behavioral AI to detect anomalous behavior, that might indicate potential, compromise in organizations.

T: Tell me exactly how you're using AI to really work toward your mission.

E: Well, AI affects us in two ways. Obviously, our core technology is an AI to understand the behavior of an organization so we can stop attacks. The other kind of significant AI is that strictly-centered AI has allowed any petty criminal to easily launch new attacks with nation state-level sophistication. So, there's kind of two impacts to that. One is that there's just a higher volume of email attacks as criminals can, basically send out personalized attacks at scale. And there's just more criminals that are now, setting cyberattacks. You no longer have to be an expert in, you know, writing emails, or even in the English language. And so we're seeing a huge rise of attacks. It's one of the reasons why business email compromise and generally social engineering is the number one cybercrime today.

T: Evan, tell me about some of the biggest challenges that you're facing and how you're overcoming them in today's landscape.

E: So the biggest challenge for us to scale, and that affects us in two ways. One is that attackers using these new generative AI technologies to, send out more attacks or more sophisticated. And for us to help our customers. We always need to be one step ahead. That means we need to out innovate the criminals. The other part is internal scaling. We're the only company in cybersecurity that's growing a hundred percent year-over-year with over a hundred million dollars of ARR. So that requires us to, scale all things internally to make sure we can provide, you know, world-class service to all of our customers worldwide.

T: Now you just mentioned how you're rapidly expanding. So what's next? What's what what can we look forward to come the future? Come 2024?

E: So I think there's, there's two big things. One is our core technology to understand people and detect anomalies in organizations. There's a lot more we can do beyond email security to protect our customers across a broader set of their platforms. And the second thing is the ability to protect more customers worldwide. That includes, you know, customers in the federal government as customers, in international regions beyond North America.

T: And tell me about some of the biggest trends that you're seeing right now in the AI and cybersecurity sectors.

E: I think the biggest trend is, really generative AI, and the ease and accessibility of tools like Chat GPT or, you know, other products from Open AI. Anyone in the world can use these tools to generate, indistinguishable texts, right, that can be distinguished against, you know, human content. Obviously, the first criminal use case for that is using generative texts to send out very sophisticated phishing attacks that are, you know, order magnitude more complex than part attack than, you know, conventional email security.

T: Well, thank you so much for joining me to talk about this, Evan.

E: Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to chatting again soon. Absolutely.