The Gately Report: AI Increasing Need for Zero Trust, ThreatLocker

Cybercriminals using artificial intelligence (AI) are accelerating the need for zero-trust security, providing more opportunities for ThreatLocker and its partners.

That’s according to Danny Jenkins, co-founder and CEO of ThreatLocker. We caught up with him during last week’s Zero Trust World.

AI is a big buzzword right now because of ChatGPT, but AI itself, of course, isn't anything new, he said. ThreatLocker uses advanced algorithms to learn from data how to permit and understand software.

“We've done that forever, and that allows us to onboard more smoothly,” Jenkins said.

AI-Enabled Attacks Not An Issue with Zero Trust

Because ThreatLocker blocks by default, cybercriminals using AI in attacks aren’t an issue, Jenkins said. It doesn’t have to detect bad things.

ThreatLocker's Danny Jenkins

“Yes, we use AI sometimes to help understand a product better or what it does ... ” he said. “But the core principle of ThreatLocker Protect is to default-deny. And the nice thing about that is it doesn't matter if you recompile it 15 times with AI, we're going to block it every single time. ThreatLocker blocks all the time because we're using zero trust, which is basically rock, paper, scissors in one.”

TheatLocker does respond to threats for Ops, its policy-based endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution that watches for unusual events or indicators of compromise (IoCs), sends alerts and takes automated actions if an anomaly is detected, Jenkins said.

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“We don't need to respond to every threat because very rarely it's not being blocked,” he said. “We respond from a validation point of view because we validate and test everything, but when you block by default, the chances are the new threat is going to be blocked. So what we do is whenever there's a new threat, we have our Ops team respond to that. We check it, we validate, we send a notice out to our customers saying you're covered. And I think because we operate on a zero-trust basis, we don't have to block; we don't have to update a new definition every minute.”

While competitors worry about defending against AI-enabled attacks, it’s not an issue for ThreatLocker, Jenkins said.

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