Tackling AI Offense and Defense with The National Football League CISO Tomás Maldonado

On the 15th episode of Enterprise Software Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Tomás Maldonado, Chief Information Security Officer at The National Football League. The NFL, comprising 32 franchises, is the world's most valuable sporting league, with over 20 billion dollars in annual revenue and a growing global brand. In this conversation, Tomás shares his thoughts on the vital role of cybersecurity in the NFL, the impact of AI on emerging security threats, and his optimism on the potential for AI-driven incident response.

00:00 Intro
00:29 About Tomás Maldonado
02:16 How Did You Get Into Cybersecurity?
06:22 What Are Some Unique Aspects of Cybersecurity in the NFL?
10:40 The Duality of An Increasingly Technological World
14:22 Surprising Ways Adversaries Are Using AI
17:18 What Role Does AI Play In Helping Defenders?
19:18 AI and the Next Generation of Cybersecurity
20:48 The Potential of AI in Threat Remediation
26:12 Lightning Round
28:23 Outro

Quick hits from Tomás:

On AI advancing the malicious potential of threat actors: “Now, adversaries don't need to know whatever language you speak to attack. They can go into open generative AI platforms and say ‘Create a message that sounds like this in the language X.’ Then put whatever payload they want in there, and then they can mass mail that to people.”

On the impact of AI to assist the efficacy of security professionals: “There's so much data to cull through to figure out who was patient zero and how it actually happened. If you're correlating all of that information into a centralized location, why not have AI spit out a timeline that says this is how Jane Doe's account was compromised? We know that these are the usual next steps for someone being compromised. Let’s help the user make better decisions.”

On how AI might improve communication for security professionals: “There's a real opportunity for incident response and this division of communication, how to communicate effectively externally. There's a real path for interacting with users and helping them make better decisions as they interact with data and share that information.”

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