The Rise of Cyber Deterrence with BforeAI’s Luigi Leguito

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back to another Techstrong TV segment. I want to introduce you to a new company and the new founder, CEO, that we haven't featured here on Techstrong before.

His name is, and I hope I get this right, Luigi, Len Due, Lento. Lento. I'm a little rusty.

I apologize, Luigi. It's okay. But Luigi is the CCEO and founder of a company called Before ai.

And, uh, first of all, welcome Luigi. It's very nice to have you on. And, and thanks for being here.

Um, thank you, olive. Thank you. So I guess we should start, before we even get into, before ai, let's, let's hear a little bit about Luigi.

We could hear, you know, you name sounds Italian, right? I'm very Italian. Yeah, I'm very tight.

I'm from Napoli in the, in the South. Uh, and you know, a little bit, a little bit about my background. I'm super passionate about computers.

Put my finger on a keyboard. I was four years old, uh, you know, was the first IBM PC 51 50. Uh, it was big Right here in Boca Raton, by the way.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah. We're gonna know that. But Boca Ratone was the place where the IBM PC Was.

And, and you will enjoy even more. This, you know, I actually still use that keyboard 43 years later, really, you know, at home, connected to my pc, uh, you know, with a pack of adapters. And, you know, I probably spent like 90% of my life in front of a screen.

Uh, you know, uh, definitely not an advocate for removing kids from phones, the lights, but, uh, you know, in, in, uh, you know, long, long journey in infrastructure and security. I've been at Dell Computer for more than 18 years. Quest software and, uh, you know, nowadays, um, you know, bringing predictive and preemptive security, uh, to the world.

Excellent. Excellent. They don't make those keyboards like that anymore, huh?

They used to have that nice, like the noise it would make and the, the, the, the feeling on your fingers, like know you hit the key, you know, it's, Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, I remember those days.

Well, but anyway, so you, you're a CEO and founder of this company before ai. Every CEO founder I know, thinks that in some way what they're doing is really important, some small way it's gonna change the world. What, what was the passion?

What drove you Mm-Hmm. To found before ai? Yeah.

I mean, listen, the one thing I've seen over the many years, uh, especially in security, is this progressive move toward a very reactive poster, right? Detect and respond, assume breach, basically everybody has to accept to be a victim in cybersecurity. I hate being a victim.

I think we should all be actor of our defenses and, and our lives. And so, you know, a few years ago, uh, you know, I was searching for something to rebalance this, uh, posterior, you know, not necessarily stopping being reactive. You know, detector respond is still very important.

But, you know, trying to bring back some left of boom, you know, uh, before Iraq happens, um, capabilities to, to rebalance the posture and give to, to people a more, uh, you know, active stance in, in defending in themself. And that is really what then led me to choose this technology that, you know, me and my co-founders found at the, at the research institute as the, of the topic to, to invest our, our next few years on. And, uh, thankfully, uh, it's working quite well.

And, and we have a fantastic team supporting us and, and great customers that are seeing the benefit of this predictive and preemptive security approach. Look, AI is, is everywhere, right? So that's all we're hearing.

No matter, even if you try not to, you still can't help but hear about how AI is doing it. But we had an interesting segment on our text, and again, actually I think it plays today that the real power of predictive and generative AI and magenta AI is not a chat interface, right? Mm-Hmm.

Yes. That makes for a nice par of tricks and impressing your friends, but that's not what's gonna really empower the revolution, so to speak. Yeah.

I think, you know, fir first of all, it's important that we realize that there are different kind of ai, there are different tools for different use, right? So you mentioned generative ai that is all about creativity, creation, new generation. Then there is predictive and prescriptive AI that are different class of, uh, algorithms that is all about very precise forecasting and precision and, uh, uh, you know, the need to identify next actions to be performed, right?

Um, you know, the two get conflated often in the last 24 months because of course, you know, the passwords and so on. But they're actually very different technologies. In our case, we do not use generative ai.

We're more on, on the prescriptive ai. I think the audience probably may have some experience with, uh, predictive, uh, analytics and, and predictive maintenance. It's more that kind of of algorithms.

So is It more in machine learning type of ai or, Yes, it's, it's, uh, you know, what we do is turning the whole internet for identifying patterns of malicious activity of criminals. And then, you know, the, the literal needle in the aack, finding those criminal infrastructure being built before they're ready so that we can then inform our customers about, about the impeding attack. Nowadays, we alert them median three weeks before the attack happen.

We get it right, 99 to 95% of the time we guarantee our prediction. So if we get it wrong and the customer get the attack, we cover 10 times the cost of this, uh, of this attack, uh, 10 times the value of our contract, sorry. In of this, uh, for the cost of the attack, uh, this is backed by Munichre, the global, uh, insurer that validated these systems that we have.

And, you know, I think what is more exciting is, you know, the prediction really enable a preemptive action. So we are not just giving the alert, you know, crying, the, the wolf crying. We are actually blocking the attack ourselves, uh, nowadays, uh, you know, thousands of attacks a day.

More than 90% of them, uh, we shut down the infrastructure before any content is loaded. And that, you know, is saving millions of people from, from frauds, from, of course, these are the customer of our cus of our customers. Mm-Hmm.

And so we avoid frauds, we avoid, you know, scams like, uh, you may have, uh, you know, big batching scams and, and things like that at scale, right? With a lot of automation. And, and I think this is for me, really where we are, we are helping kind of take another, uh, another stance on cybersecurity.

One where it's not about just observing and monitoring what's happening, but actually doing things like stopping attack a more active defense approach. So that, that's something we're seeing more at at Louis. You see, and I've been in security 25, 28 years myself, right?

And I think I would say one of the bigger things, changes that we've seen over the last couple years, just the last two, three years, is that organizations are more open to being active in their cyber responses. Mm-hmm. Right?

2001, I I started a company, we, we started selling what we called back then IS Right? Intrusion prevention systems. Mm-Hmm.

When the state of the art at the time was ideas intrusion detection. Yep. And we thought it was a no brainer.

If I detected an attack, why wouldn't you want me to block it? I detected malicious traffic, block it. But no, back then it was, no, no.

We want a human to see it and make that decision. Mm-Hmm. Well, by the time a human sees it, the attack's been there, done that, and is over, you know, uh, that, and, and, but they didn't trust the machine.

They didn't trust the algorithm. They didn't trust the system. I think what the advent of, of predictive ai, and, and you know, we've gotten more trusting of, Hey, this is bad and we gotta do something.

And if we wait for a human, it's too late. I think, I think there are, you know, what, what you're saying is, is still ongoing, right? It's, it's a maturity journey.

Uh, I wouldn't say that people trust AI or trust automation is that there are more proof that it actually does more good than bad, right? So, you know, the, the, the, you know, the cyber security is an, has been historical, an extension of it. So, you know, creating disruption in the IT operation is obviously a no-go, right?

But I think the cost of not doing something and let the attack happen has now become so huge that that disruption is much more problematic, right? And so I'm a big advocate of actually shifting the thinking from the, you know, meantime to response to a meantime to unblock to, to, you know, from a reactive stance where you measure how quick are you at getting these criminal that are in real time targeting you into one where you are more aggressive with your defensive, uh, activities. And yes, you can make a mistake, but you can correct it faster, right?

And, uh, you know, do you want to bet on your ability to guess what the criminals are doing? Or do you want to bet on your ability to be very quick at resolving a mistake you made? And I think this, this is the journey that the industry is going, uh, at the moment through, it will take still some year to, to, to, to pan out.

But the more sophisticated, um, security operation teams are definitely already there. And listen, you know, in the last nine months we saw our prediction grow by 400% in volume. So, and you know, as I said, our prediction are generally months ahead of the criminal activity.

So we are forced, you know, some very, very intense increase in volume and variety of attacks that human being just cannot tackle from, uh, you know, from an, an effective and, and cost effective way. Agreed. Agreed.

You know, you said something, and it really resonates with me 'cause I fought this battle, right? Trying to get people to, to glit automated, uh, uh, blocking come in. I don't think it's a question of convincing them that the automation is foolproof or perfect or really, really good either.

I think when the pain of the attack, when the, the, the, the cost of the attack is so high, it is so expensive, that's what it'll take to push them to say, all right, it's almost like a zero choice kind of thing, right? Mm-Hmm. All right.

Do it automatically and then I'll try to have a human or, you know, unblock as, as fast as we can. I think, I think there are, there are two things on top of it, right? So first of all, you know, one thing that our customers telling us that we help them with is actually mon, you know, showing the value of this preemptive action, right?

So we actually put a dollar amount, we provide them every quarter review in which we tell them, Hey, we predicted so many attacks. We block so many, hence you saved so much money. And, and, and making visible this preventive activity is very powerful because now they can go back to their CFO to the board and say, Hey, you see we did this investment.

I look, you know, what a hero I am that I'm saving you all this money, right? So that's the first thing. You know, in the past, prevention you never know is a bit like an insurance, right?

You have it, but you never know what has avoided you. And so that visibility aspect is important. The other piece is, and you point the finger in the right direction, is the complexity, the sophistication and the speed of those attack has just gone way farther than you can touch them in real time.

And so, yes, there are things that obviously cannot be predicted. You know, we're not, you know, the company started in Pel inside of France. I'm not Nostradamus that, you know, is from that city.

I don't have the book with all the prediction, but we can predict, you know, probably about 98% of the attack volume, about 85% of the attack types and what is left. Definitely you want to have, uh, you know, the detection and response, but also more concentrated, right? You can now, you know, make more aggressive your detection rules.

You can make sure that, you know, your security team is actually doing job that is adding value and not just chasing, you know, very, very low level alerts in the CM that is not, you know, it's not enriching for anybody. So I think, you know, the, it, it once again is a journey, is there is not black and white. Each company will be at a different stage in this process.

But the, you know, you, I mean, you have been in this industry as long as I've been, this is like a pendulum, right? Is wing, you know, guardrail to guardrail and, and now we are full on the dry react stance versus, you know, maybe 15 years ago we were all full on, on the protective stance. And so I think now it's kind of swinging back.

And that was my bet when we started, is we, we could catch the wave of the return of the pendulum if you want. And, and it's definitely happening from, from, you know, what I see in the market and, and the feedback we are getting from people. Fantastic.

Luigi, we only have a few moments left, but I wanna turn maybe more to business kind of thing. How is before ai, is this a SaaS offer or any, how, how, Mm-Hmm. How does a customer engage?

Yeah, definitely. It's, it's a fully, uh, subscription based, uh, SaaS, but SaaS as in service, as a software, as in we provide an outcome that is the blocking of the attack. Not just, you know, the tools for your team to work in.

Actually, uh, we suggested that the tool let is let run automatically. We have very little integration to do with the, with the, with the organization. We don't use customer data at all.

You know, to be truly predictive, you have to be out scouting for the criminals not watching their signal in your network, right? So we don't use any customer data for that. And I think the, the promise of before AI is really the one of being before the attack and blocking the attack before it hits.

And, uh, as I say, 99 to 95% guaranteed, uh, from, from our capabilities. Um, but, you know, the, the, there is a ton of things that we are seeing now when we do this preemption at scale for, for our customers as the criminal don't get any return from their attacks, they go away. But there is kind of a deterrence aspect that that starts in, uh, in, you know, and, and recently Garner actually published a report about a new wave of concept around cyber deterrence.

And we can definitely say that we, we are measuring it with our customer nowadays. Love it. We didn't mention the website.

It's that easy. ai. Love it.

Luigi, I, I love what you guys are doing. This sounds just what the doctor ordered, the Dr. Woodard.

I'd love to have you back on and continue the discussion and, and you know more about what you all are doing. But congratulations and keep up the great work and thanks for being on Textron tv. Thank you, Alan.

And I hope, uh, many want to visit our website and find more about pre-crime. You know, if you have captured the Minority report, I, um, connection, it's definitely where the inspiration came from Really. That's good.

Uh, Tom Cruise fan. Alrighty. We're gonna be back here on Tech Drunk TV with more, but check out P four.

That's B-F-O-R-E. Do Ai Boi will speak to you soon. We're gonna be back in just a moment.