Black Hat USA 2024: The Year of Artificial Intelligence and CTEM

Need-to-know trends from hacker summer camp

Black Hat 2024 was as grand as ever. From double decker booths to custom sneakers and stuffed whales, and even an espresso martini bar … companies brought their “A” game. 

But Black Hat, and “summer hacker camp” in general, is so much more than creative marketing and free drinks. It’s a gathering of the brightest minds in cybersecurity. It’s the place you go to learn what other companies are doing where you rank amongst competitors. It pushes us all to challenge our product roadmaps and think outside the box. 

The PlexTrac team took full advantage of the weeks’ festivities, including attending BSidesLV, the AI Summit, Black Hat, and DEF CON. As our leadership debriefed at the end of the week, there was one common theme: Artificial Intelligence is EVERYWHERE.

Our founder and CTO explained, the AI summit was all about “how to solve problems with AI and solve risks around AI.” And PlexTrac is no exception. We recently launched Plex AI, a pentest report writing assistant, to analyze large data sets and summarize key themes from a range of offensive data. There were multiple problems we were trying to solve, like helping pentesters speed reporting time so they can hack more and report less and easing writer’s block by offering a starting point for themes and an executive summary. 

But as our CMO, Jeremy Nazarian pointed out, “there’s a suitable amount of skepticism, as you might expect from a security audience.” He went on to say, “a lot of that is around the various implementations of AI. I think there’s a lot of security concerns that there’s going to be GPT-like experience implemented on top of a public model.” 

It’s a valid concern that we heard a lot of when we first rolled out Plex AI. We received questions like “is this essentially ChatGPT?” And the answer is a resounding, “no.” Our AI feature, the first of many in the works, was created internally by our head of AI, Michael Bell. All interactions among system components, including AI, are secured through encrypted channels utilizing TLS 1.2. Within your PlexTrac instance, all AI components utilize PlexTrac’s RBA system to guarantee appropriate access controls. This ensures that client, reports, and classification requests adhere to configured access controls, thereby maintaining security and integrity when utilizing generative components. 

On the flip side, you have the folks that are like, “why not just use ChatGPT?” Michael addressed this question with our CEO, Andy Langsam. As Mike expressed, “It’s kind of a little bit of a flippant attitude to have with your client data. There’s lots of compliance and governance requirements for data privacy, especially in this AI era. just putting people’s data wherever is really going to rear its ugly head. And so how we deal with that is we use static models that are privately hosted, that are not being trained on your data. And we use other representations of that data for our models to reference, which removes that training aspect on the newer data where the client is.”

“AI” wasn’t the only buzzword at Black Hat. “CTEM” was just as prevalent with vendors working on helping organizations achieve continuous threat and exposure management.  

As Jeremy explained, “You see lots of vendors positioning themselves as system or exposure management vendors. And I think that there’s a little confusion around what CTEM is. Is it a market segment or is it a framework or a set of outcomes that you drive? And the reality is it’s probably some mix of all three.”

He continued to explain that from a customer perspective, “It’s important to think about it as an outcome that you build toward. And it’s really important to think about, when you look at that framework, do I have to have all of those pieces in place in order to begin to realize value now? And the answer to that question is no.” But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t steps organizations can take. “Enterprises particularly are thinking about how they can adopt technology today. And that moves them further toward a full fledged CTEM lifecycle.”

PlexTrac is fully committed to helping organizations move toward CTEM. As our VP of Product, Sara Foley, stated, “PlexTrac is excited to be on the CTEM train, helping you expose vulnerabilities and make sure you have continuous validation throughout your process so that you can show those remediation efforts and demonstrate an improved security posture.” 

Our CRO, Alex Thomson, astutely pointed out, CTEM is a continuum. “The goalpost keeps changing.” Organizations are asking themselves “do I have the right solutions and partners in place.” Because the reality is, security isn’t a one time thing. There are so many layers. And at PlexTrac, we are working to stay one step ahead. To help customers on their journey to CTEM. 

Ready to keep the Black Hat party going?

For additional insights on AI and vulnerability management, check out our webinar recording, How AI Impacts the Future of Pentest Reporting and Vulnerability Management featuring Michael Bell and our friend Jason Haddix.