Cyber Threats
The Value of Questions in the Age of Automated Answers
Recently, new joiners of Trend Micro from multiple European Business Units attended Trend Social Connect in Cork, Ireland, where we gathered to network and discover more about Trend’s history and its plans for the future.
Not to wax lyrical but ‘glad to be here’ was the phrase that ran through my head often, as I looked out on a beautiful, sunny Cork, as I belly-laughed with a Swedish colleague I’d never met before, as I listened to our CFO, Mahendra Negi, talking about the value of failure in the journey of success.
There was one phrase Mahendra used in particular that struck me with real force: “progress doesn’t come from giving what we think are the correct answers, but from asking the correct questions.”
Indeed, in the Age of AI and automation, getting answers has never been easier. In fact, as a largely outcomes-based society, we love hunting for answers more than we like being asked the difficult questions which challenge those answers. Essentially, we crave solutions and we crave them fast.
One only needs to look at recent research on Chat-GPT to see that AI comes with negative implications as well as offering vast possibilities. Essentially, we must ask ourselves is it stopping us from thinking, as Hitherto argues, is it exposing us to threat or is it encouraging us to think in new ways? Perhaps all three… Regardless of what you think about Chat-GPT, it is true that if we keep inputting the same type of question into the chat-box, we will keep getting the same type of answer. Taking this analogy, it is true that if we want to find meaningful cybersecurity solutions then it is going to be through asking valuable and sometimes challenging questions.
This is important in the constantly shifting world of cybersecurity, where the solutions or answers that work one day, fail to work the next. Therefore, it is through consistently asking the right questions that organisations and individuals will be able to develop innovative strategies for defending against increasingly complex and innovative threat tactics.
Though still very new to the company, I can safely say that Trend Micro isn’t just about providing product or platform solutions. Instead, it is about providing customers with a philosophy of perception that allows them to see threats in different ways and to ask themselves questions which facilitate meaningful security transformation. Reciprocally, we also listen to and act upon the questions asked by customers to make our own security solutions better.
Ultimately, questions make processes dynamic, and so it is through asking ‘how can we make this better?’, ‘what is and isn’t working?’, ‘why are we doing this?’ that organisations can develop dynamic cybersecurity strategies capable of withstanding the simulations of the modern threat landscape.