Attending Black Hat 2024 with Cyber Defense Magazine is always an enlightening experience, giving me the opportunity to interview several industry leaders who are paving the way for cybersecurity innovation.
One of the most insightful discussions I had was with Richard Bird, the Chief Security Officer of Traceable AI. Richard shared his deep expertise on the importance of API security at a granular level, emphasizing the critical role that Traceable plays in protecting modern enterprises from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Traceable AI tackles API security with a comprehensive platform that provides end-to-end protection. It focuses on providing comprehensive API security solutions. The company is known for its granular approach to API security, which includes capabilities such as API discovery, threat detection, context-aware security, and API security testing. Led by Richard, Traceable AI is a key player in the cybersecurity landscape, particularly in protecting organizations from the growing threats associated with API vulnerabilities. The platform’s key features include:
API Discovery and Cataloging: Automatically and continuously identifies all APIs within an organization’s ecosystem, offering complete visibility. This feature helps security teams understand their API exposure and monitor sensitive data flows in real-time.
Threat Detection and Prevention: Utilizing advanced AI and machine learning, Traceable detects and blocks both known and unknown API vulnerabilities, including zero-day attacks and OWASP Top 10 threats. The platform’s sophisticated anomaly detection capabilities enable it to identify and respond to unusual API behaviors, reducing the risk of breaches.
Context-Aware Security: The platform provides deep contextual analysis by correlating API activity over time. This allows for accurate identification of threats and vulnerabilities, enabling security teams to take immediate action based on real-time insights.
API Security Testing: Traceable’s API Security Testing (AST) feature allows organizations to test their APIs against a wide range of vulnerabilities before deployment. This proactive approach helps in identifying and mitigating risks early in the development cycle.
In addition to its robust API security features, Traceable AI is also one of the leaders in securing generative AI technologies. As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into various applications, it introduces new security challenges, such as shadow AI, sensitive data loss, and vulnerabilities unique to AI-driven processes. Traceable AI addresses these challenges by providing comprehensive API protection tailored to the specific risks associated with generative AI.
The platform offers continuous monitoring and analysis of API calls, which is critical in identifying and mitigating risks in real-time. By applying its advanced machine learning models, Traceable AI ensures that generative AI implementations are secure from threats like unauthorized access, data exfiltration, and abuse of AI capabilities. This proactive approach helps organizations safely integrate generative AI into their operations without compromising security.
Traceable primarily targets large enterprises across various industries, including financial services, technology, and healthcare, where API security is critical due to the sensitive nature of the data handled. The platform’s ability to provide granular control and real-time protection makes it especially valuable for organizations that rely heavily on APIs for their operations.
One notable example of Traceable’s impact is its collaboration with Informatica, a leading cloud data management company. Informatica leveraged Traceable to gain continuous visibility into their API infrastructure, enabling them to detect and respond to breaches in the shortest possible time. By identifying the root cause of security issues and remediating them quickly, Informatica was able to protect its vast API ecosystem from potential threats, demonstrating the effectiveness of Traceable’s platform in a real-world scenario.
Traceable.ai stands out in the crowded cybersecurity landscape by offering a robust, context-aware API security solution that addresses the unique challenges of modern enterprises. By providing comprehensive API visibility, advanced threat detection, and proactive security testing, Traceable empowers organizations to secure their APIs against the ever-evolving threat landscape. As API usage continues to grow, the need for such granular security solutions will only become more critical, positioning Traceable as a key player in the future of cybersecurity solutions. To learn about Traceable AI’s research, mission or solutions, visit https://www.traceable.ai/why-traceable-api-security.
About the Author
Kylie Amison is a proud alumnus of George Mason University where she obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in Cybersecurity Engineering with a minor in intelligence analysis and on call reporter for Cyber Defense Magazine
She is working full time at a leading mobile security company as an Application Security Analyst where her main tasking involves pen-testing mobile applications, secure mobile application development, and contributing to exciting projects and important initiatives that are consistently highlighted throughout the security industry.
In addition, Kylie contributed to a startup company as a cybersecurity software developer where she was the lead developer on one of the company’s products; a geopolitical threat intelligence engine that combines a broad assortment of metrics and NLP sentiment analysis to calculate nuanced and real-time threat scores per nation state. Contributing to this initiative has been pivotal in her knowledge of creating secure software and has given her the opportunity to not only develop her first product, but to also start her own startup company, productizing the software and capabilities created in her threat intelligence engine. She is presently co-founder and CTO of Xenophon Analytics.
Throughout all of her experiences and coursework, she has gained essential skills in secure software development, penetration testing, mobile security and a plethora of coding languages. She has further aspirations of going back to school to get a graduate degree in the field of digital forensics and cybersecurity.
Beyond academics and professional life, Kylie enjoys watching anime, reading, and doing anything with nature involved. When asked her ultimate goal in life, she responded with “My goal in life is to learn every single day, and I am proud to be doing just that.”