 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of MY's here in Washington DC. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my two co-hosts and analysts, Rob Streche and John Furrier. So we're going to do a little analyst angle here. We're going to talk about the great lineup of guests that we've had and dig into the conversations we've been having and what we're hearing and your take, both of you. So Rob, I want to start with you. We had many guests on this morning. We had Jeff Reed, VP of Product Cloud Security, Google Cloud, Eric Dorr, VP of Engineering for Cloud Security. Those are just two of them. Lots of product announcements, lots of new updates. What strike you? What about the go-to-market strategy? What is most salient to you? I think what was really striking and really a good takeaway from this conference is integration and ease of use and AI. Those top three things that really come to mind when I started to talk to Eric and Jeff and we were both on with them and having this conversation about how do they make it more accessible? How do they make security not as scary and how do they really bring a number of different things? Like the attack surface management within Mandiant, the Mandiant attack surface management product that they brought out, plus chronicle security operations that they brought out and renewed and had some new features going into and really bringing that together with what they announced at Google Cloud Next which was really the addition of AI from Duet AI. It was really exciting and I think, again, this is stuff that John and I were talking about at length all the AI announcements that they've had and I think there's a really good thread here that they get that this is hard and the toil and I think you are even reaching into some of the toil and what that means for how people work and I think that was really one of the key things about this is how do you make things simpler so you avoid burnout and don't lose the security professionals? That is exactly what we keep hearing about that these are hard jobs, this is a big, bad, scary world and a lot of these jobs, they can be demoralizing because there is just so much that can go wrong and it's hard to retain people in this line of work. John, what do you think of that? I mean, is AI going to remove the toil, remove some of the hardships of these jobs? I mean, the AI conversation is so hyped up right now, it has to be in the conversation now for sure but in the backdrop of Washington D.C. where this event is, it's been a week of AI and they're still doing intelligent hearings on the Hill, that's all they're talking about is AI, AI, AI, how do you secure AI and is it good for secure? There's two questions to that thing so as industry analysts, we look at it and say, okay, what's happening? I think the big takeaway from the analysis is one, China, the dominance of China and its rise to, as the CEO, Kevin Mandi said, the varsity team or the top of the apex competitor, apex attacker, apex species of hackers, they're kicking ass, so China's huge and they don't play fair. The asymmetry angle is happening, they're saying, you know, someone on the couch, the teenage hackers are effective at social engineering and that's another big part of the story, so that's happening, so the urgency of security as a warfare issue is more than ever a geopolitical thing. I find that interesting. The other thing is we heard from former Gartner analysts here who also was now works at Google, he had an interesting angle too, he's like, okay, they're living in the 90s and he's going a little bit over the top, but in terms of technology, he's equating the outdated, antiquated systems to the 90s, implying and basically illustrating that a lot of the stuff that they're using is older tech. So there's a modernization, digital transformation going on in an industry that's under siege from outside adversaries to new stuff's coming in that they haven't seen before with social engineering and they have now this AI opportunity, so I think, I'm a bullish on AI, I think it's going to be used immediately in areas where it's regulated, where there's no ambiguity. Regulated industries where you know what you're getting and you know the quality of what's being curated and or developed and then you're going to see it really augment the human aspect and I think the conversation is going to be all about the creativity, Rebecca, that's going to be unleashed, so my prediction is there's going to be a creative class emerging out of the tech world, which is weird because you think, okay, we kind of have a creative customer, not in the nerd culture, I mean, imagine what is going to open up for the people defending the attacks when you have creativity opened up and AI does the reports, all the legal filings, I mean, there's a bunch of BS work, Rob, that the top brains have to write the scripts. I mean, I think it's going to be an opportunity, but it's going to be low-hanging fruit first, known things, regulated industries, non-ambiguity will be attacked first with the AI and again, how do you manage the AI? On the other side, AI will be a factor, no doubt about it. Well, I really like what you said about this emerging creative class within AI because really using AI effectively is about asking good questions, knowing how to get different kinds of answers, giving the good prompts. I mean, do you agree with John's take about this sort of emerging creative class in this industry? Yeah, I think it's a very interesting way to look at it that you're going to have to think more artistically. So how much of it is science? Maybe the science is actually done by AI and you have to be more artistic and I don't mean like painting and writing, but you have to use other parts of your brain, which again, I look at that and start to think, okay, one of the other themes that's been going throughout this is thinking differently. We have to be more creative. We have to think like them. The asymmetric attacks from China, for instance, and ScatterSpider and all of these other things that are going on, where they're using social engineering. I mean, that's been another big theme here is that without using malware, without using zero days, people are getting exposed and getting into almost any company. And that's one of these things that companies are going to have to come to grips with, it's okay and they have to be able to understand it. It's going to happen and how do they not become one of thousands, but they're one and done. Out of that. And I think one of the things that Kevin Mandy said when he came on this morning on theCUBE, he was kind of pointing out that the doctrine, I asked him the doctrine question for the government and he kind of, he kind of looked, he said, oh, there you go. He had a good angle. He's like, okay, it's going to be different. It may not be the military doctrine that we had before, but new ways to manage the people who are quote, living off the land, which is the term used for hackers who get in without malware and they get in through social engineering legitimately as a user to the system. So they're in their in compromised environment and wandering around, living off the land, finding the jewels, if you will, for that company. That's more prominent and more zero days are out there now. So we got more zero day opportunities for the hackers. The living off the land allows for to be undetected. So the question is, what's the consequences? Now it used to be in the military doctrine, that if you want to have a free country, you have liberty and all that and if you attacked us, we would attack back, but that's if it's on the ground, like a physical. So now digital, what's the digital version? Like if someone gets caught living in the land, what do you do? But I think Kevin's also, his point on that whole thing was super interesting. He's like, I don't necessarily want the government to go out and regulate things. What I want them to do is put the fear in other people and I'm summarizing what he said. He didn't say this. But he said more or less I want them to put the fear that there's going to be repercussions. You come in and hack into MGM or Caesars or Coinbase or wherever, we're going to come and find you and we're going to throw you in jail. We're going to penalize you. We're going to come and deal with you. And I think that is something that's really not getting talked about on Capitol Hill right now with all this AI and I think the other things when we were talking to Eric and Jeff was about securing the actual data. And I think John and I have been talking about this as well over the last couple of weeks and especially at Google Cloud Next was the fact that garbage in and garbage out and you and I were even talking about this earlier with them and you got to be careful about how do you not have the wrong data infiltrated into your LLMs so that you're now getting misinformation within your own company. And I think that actually is a scary proposition where these become targets, these LLMs become targets themselves. Because they already are prone to do that and they are easily tricked, let's be honest. And a lot of them have some super sensitive data. If you think about it, if you're deploying an LLM or an SLM as I would call them a segmented language model for your financial, your CFOs organization so that you can bring on new accountants and they can come up to speed and ask what is the terminology, what do we mean by EBITDA and how is it composed in art the way we do our financial reporting? If somebody were to go in there and be able to expose that underlying data, that's pretty devastating to a company. I think the other thing too, Rebecca, that came out is that you mentioned toil earlier in AI. The other thing that's concerning is the role of AI at the board level and obviously we know that everyone knows that's an issue. But the rule changes, so the SEC, we had an interview this morning with Accenture, they had a rule change, you got 72 hours to report it. So as a filing on your 10K or 8K, which is really to send signals to the investor market for public companies, this is a nightmare scenario. I mean, I was trying to be nice on stage and be like, okay, let's get it out there, call Accenture up, they got services, but I mean, come on, now you got third parties involved. I mean, that is like the stock will plummet. And then the Google, I mean, Marshall said it's a buying opportunity, it's not insider trading because it's public information. So there's a whole nother stock market dynamic going on around impact to company, that's not an IT issue, Rob. That's a business concern, one that the reputation risk. So now you got to disclose it. So even if you don't know what it is, you got to go out there. So that's going to be, we'll see if that has teeth. Yeah, at the same time though, we do have to accept and acknowledge that these are commonplace. I mean, these kinds of attacks, these kinds of ransomware, this is just a part of doing business in the world today. I mean, it's like, if you're a CISO, you got, you're dealing with all these threats every day and now you got to do all these reports. Okay, filings. Okay, that's just more lawyers, more lawyers, more posturing. And so the question comes down to, and I thought the keynote addressed this, are the best minds of our day there are needed to defend being used for mundane, non-productive tasks. So there's a give-get on, is it worth it? Does it matter? I mean, do Wall Street really know the nuance of a living off the land attack or social engineering versus, say, a malware exploit? Yeah, and I think, again, what is that reporting really going to look like in that moment? And to your point, is there enough detail in there for you to understand beyond saying, hey, we've been hit, this is how many customers, stuff was exfiltrated, they didn't get, you know, other than their name and address and email, they didn't get any other personal or credit cards or whatever. Okay, great, but that doesn't mean that it's over. And I think that was the interesting thing is that how long and how prolonged and how persistent these actors are and how they are getting in and sitting there and doing this over months. Yeah, one of the things, we're back on the AI thing, come back, circle back to that piece with the Anton who came on. I got to tell you, I've been so focused on AI for security, I was completely been missing the boat on how do you secure the AI, okay? So the risks associated with machine learning, how adversarial tax impact machine learning models that have been verified, what about verifying privacy, okay? Privacy and context of AI, the risks for threat detection, which is their core business. Fairness, bias in AI and using bias as a social engineering opportunity and transparency accountability. These are real questions. We even saw the LLM presentation on injections, prompt engineering injections. So securing the AI will become a supply chain factor like we're seeing in clown data. So that's an area that we're probably going to be talking a lot about. Yeah, I think that's a huge key is, because again, who wants to sit there and format reports or have to do that. And I think Kevin talked about that. Mandia who was on this morning was like, hey, if I had had this, I spent 85% of my time actually doing, building the reports and only 15% of the time was actually doing the discovery and the details and all of the digging. If I could use AI to go and format these reports. But again, he was looking at it from a more grammatical perspective. I look at it and go, what if it's hallucinating and it just popped something weird in there? You still have to go back and QC it and understand it. But maybe you can shortcut the toil out of some of those types of activities. Lastly, I want to talk about co-opetition, because that has been another theme that we've been hearing about. We're going to be actually talking later today with Charles Carmichael of Mandia Consulting. He got up on stage with people from three different companies, Microsoft, Barracuda and Coinbase, where they all were really vulnerable, talking about what happened at their companies and shared in ways that you would think, why are you telling this to us? This does not make you guys look good. But sharing this, saying, here's what we did, here's what we learned, and here's how we're keeping it from happening in the future. These are really important steps to be taking and also as an industry to be taking together. I mean, are you as struck by that, by the fact that they're willing to do this? Well, I'm struck that there's not a lot of AWS discussion here, but that's another cloud. Google's now part of this. Microsoft's been very open. Google and Microsoft have been very open clouds from a partnering standpoint, among the hyperscalers. Amazon obviously number one, they're going to be there. So if Amazon was on stage, it would have been blown away. That would have been a really a home run panel because you have all the clouds represented and you had a crypto exchange Coinbase. That would have been like a killer panel. But I think sharing is going to be part of it. And this is where the shared responsibility model that we've reported a lot about from Amazon reinforced in the industry is huge and I think the sharing and collaboration will probably be the answer to a lot of these known problems Rob, you were hinting at the accountability piece and how do you, what's the punishment to keep that people deterred. So I think you're going to see more sharing, but it's still an opportunity for the exploits and the hackers because there's a lot of seams that they call it when people kind of work together. And that has to be nailed down. I think you'll see a lot more collaboration across clouds. The CASB question was the broker tokens, how do you handle things like that? I mean, there's a lot of technical things that need to be put in place just to do that, right? So I think it's challenging. It's a lot of more cultural discussion Rebecca than it is meaty tech yet because multicloud is just emerging or super cloud as we call it. So I'm optimistic. I think culture is where I play rather than the meaty tech, I leave that to Rob. It's a good culture. They have to share. And that's why the FBI is saying, come to us. Now, Scuttlebutt on the hallway around the FBI director was the FBI saying, hey, we're not going to raid you. Okay, we're going to be safe. Meanwhile, the SEC is cracking down on all the crypto companies. So it's like, like there's a little bit of a trust factor involved in the government side of it, but you know, private public partnerships. But I think also to the whole ecosystem. I mean, again, Eric having been at Microsoft and now only, you know, been at Google cloud and helping to catch Mandy and then really do the integration. I think it becomes one of these where these people move around. And I mean, even the story that Microsoft was telling on stage today, he's like, oh, why called up Charlie? You know who Charlie is? Charlie's Charlie Bell, who used to be at AWS. So he tells the story about how then Charlie called Satya. It's like, you start to look at all of these people and how they come together. And it's- You know a thing or two about that, too, Rob. Yeah, I mean, having worked with Charlie. So I mean, it's very interesting to see how that stack comes together. And I think to John's point, I would have been blown away to see AWS here. I am still struck about how prominent Microsoft has been here and some of the others who are co-opetitioned. And I really love it to tell you the truth. I think it's definitely needed. I think the ISAC discussion that we had with Eric and with Jeff earlier today about how the industries are coming together on their own. I still agree with Kevin that, you know, I don't know that there needs to be a bright red line or something like that, but there needs to be repercussions. And that's the only, that government has to do that. I don't see private industry going out and taking out, you know, having offensive capabilities to take out, you know, the scattered spider folk or anything like that. Well, from an American standpoint, if you're an American and the digital soil, I call it, is our land. And if troops dropped on our shores, the government would probably respond with military force. So, you know, I've always been advocate, people on theCUBE know I've been mind ranting on this all the time for years, that when the digital paper cuts that are cutting us up, they're below the doctrine of attacking because what does digital even mean? So I think the world has woke up in this show again, I think amplifies the fact that this critical infrastructure is victims. They use that on the stage. They say victim being taken down and financially hurt or mostly hurt. And so it's not just hacking for infrastructure stuff. It's more of, hey, you know, a big bank hack could impact people's lives. You've got identity theft, all this stuff's happening. So I think this digital land of soil is being addressed. I think now you see the industry stepping up. And Mandy has been leading the charge here because they're the threat detection kings. They got the data. Great. Thanks so much, John and Rob, for sharing this analyst angle. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of MYS. We'll be right back after this short break.