Certified: The GIAC GISF Audio Course

In this episode, we’re going to talk about how automation and artificial intelligence can make defenders faster and more consistent, while also learning how to avoid the trap of trusting them too much. Beginners often hear about A I and imagine a system that magically detects attackers with perfect accuracy. In reality, automation and A I are tools that can help you handle scale, reduce repetitive work, and spot patterns humans might miss, but they also introduce new risks. The biggest risk is overtrust, which is when people accept outputs as truth without checking assumptions, context, and potential failure modes. Security is a high-stakes environment where mistakes can disrupt systems, lock out users, or miss real intrusions. The goal of this lesson is to build a balanced mindset: use automation and A I to increase speed and coverage, but keep human judgment and verification in the loop where it matters.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

To ground this discussion, it helps to define automation in a defensive context. Automation is any system-driven action that happens with little or no human effort after it is set up. It can be as simple as enriching an alert with asset details or as advanced as isolating a device when a high-confidence threat is detected. The value of automation comes from consistency and time savings. Humans get tired, distracted, and inconsistent across shifts. Automated steps run the same way every time and can be applied at scale. When defenders are flooded with alerts, automation can handle repetitive tasks like deduplicating similar events, tagging alerts with severity based on known rules, and gathering context from multiple data sources. Even without advanced A I, this kind of workflow automation can dramatically improve response speed and reduce the mental load on analysts.

Now let’s define what we mean by A I in this lesson. A I is a broad term, but in defensive technologies it often refers to models that identify patterns, classify events, or predict risk based on data. Some systems use machine learning to detect anomalies, such as unusual login behavior or rare process patterns. Other systems use natural language processing to summarize incidents, categorize alerts, or extract key details from reports. These approaches can be helpful because cybersecurity data is large, messy, and full of subtle relationships. A I can quickly scan large datasets and propose connections a human might take longer to notice. However, A I does not understand your environment the way you do. It does not automatically know what is normal for your business. Its outputs are shaped by training data, configuration, and the quality of the signals you provide.

A practical way to think about automation and A I is to separate the tasks they perform into three broad categories: enrichment, detection support, and response support. Enrichment is about adding context, like telling you whether an account is privileged, whether a device is critical, or whether an I P is known to be associated with malicious activity. Detection support is about helping decide whether something looks suspicious, such as scoring an alert based on anomaly detection or matching behavioral patterns. Response support is about helping you act, such as suggesting next steps, generating a case summary, or triggering containment actions. When beginners confuse these categories, they may expect a tool designed for enrichment to make final decisions or expect a detection model to safely execute disruptive actions without human review. Keeping these categories distinct helps you decide where automation is safe and where it is risky.

The biggest reason overtrust happens is that automation often looks confident. A system might assign a high risk score, label an event as malicious, or generate a neat summary that feels authoritative. Humans are naturally tempted to accept clean outputs, especially when they are tired or under time pressure. Overtrust becomes dangerous when it replaces verification. For example, an automated system might flag a legitimate administrative action as malicious because it is rare, and if a team automatically isolates a critical server, they could cause an outage. On the other hand, a system might miss a real attack because it lacks the right visibility or because the attacker mimics normal behavior, and if a team assumes the system would catch everything, they may not investigate early signals. The core problem is treating automated output as a verdict rather than a clue. In cybersecurity, outputs should be inputs into a decision process, not the end of the process.

To avoid overtrust, you need to understand common failure modes. One failure mode is false positives, where normal behavior is flagged as malicious. These often happen when baselines are weak, environments change, or rare legitimate actions occur. Another failure mode is false negatives, where malicious behavior is missed. These happen when attackers operate quietly, use valid credentials, or exploit gaps in data collection. A third failure mode is bias in what data the system sees. If telemetry is incomplete, models will form conclusions based on partial reality. A fourth failure mode is drift, which means the environment changes over time, but the detection logic or model assumptions do not keep up. For beginners, the key lesson is that tools are not wrong because they make mistakes. Tools are dangerous when people forget that mistakes are possible and stop checking.

One of the safest and most valuable uses of automation is alert enrichment and triage acceleration. Imagine an alert arrives about a suspicious login. Automation can instantly attach useful context: whether the account is privileged, whether multi-factor authentication is enabled, whether the device is managed, and whether the location is unusual for the user. That context helps a human decide quickly whether the alert is likely benign or worth escalation. Automation can also group related alerts into a single case, reducing duplication. These tasks are low risk because they do not directly change systems. They simply make the analyst’s job faster and more informed. When you start with low-risk automation, you gain value without creating large blast radius mistakes. This is a strong beginner strategy: automate information gathering and organization first, then consider more aggressive actions only after quality and confidence are proven.

A more advanced use is automated response, sometimes called orchestration. The idea is that once certain conditions are met, the system can take actions such as disabling an account, isolating an endpoint, blocking a domain, or forcing a password reset. These actions can be powerful because they reduce attacker dwell time, but they are also risky because they can disrupt legitimate operations. The key to safe automated response is careful gating. Gating means requiring high confidence, combining multiple signals, and sometimes requiring human approval for high-impact actions. For example, isolating a user laptop might be acceptable with moderate confidence if it does not affect critical services, while isolating a production server should require stronger confirmation and approval. Beginners should understand that the difference between helpful automation and harmful automation is often policy, thresholds, and safeguards, not the technology itself.

A I-driven detection often relies on anomaly detection, so it is worth understanding why anomalies are tricky. An anomaly is something that differs from what is typical. That sounds simple, but typical behavior can change quickly. A company might shift to remote work, launch a new service, or run a large migration project, and suddenly many behaviors become unusual. If an A I model flags all of that as suspicious, analysts may become overwhelmed, and they may start ignoring alerts. Attackers can also intentionally blend into normal patterns. If they use existing tools and credentials and move slowly, their behavior may not look anomalous. That means anomaly detection is best treated as a guide for investigation, not a guarantee of threat. It is like a smoke detector that can sometimes be triggered by cooking. You do not throw it away because it has false alarms, but you also do not assume every alarm is a fire without checking.

Another area where A I can help is summarization and prioritization, especially when dealing with many alerts. A system might produce a natural language summary of why an alert was generated, what evidence supports it, and what related events occurred. This can save time, but it can also create overtrust if the summary is treated as complete. Summaries can omit details, misunderstand relationships, or present uncertainty as certainty. A good habit is to treat summaries as a starting point that tells you where to look, then verify by reviewing the underlying evidence. If you are new to security, this habit is particularly important because you are still building intuition about what evidence matters. A summary might sound plausible even when it is wrong, so verification protects you from learning incorrect patterns.

Emerging intelligence interacts with automation and A I in both positive and risky ways. On the positive side, new threat intelligence can be quickly turned into detections and enrichment rules, such as flagging a newly identified phishing domain pattern or a new technique for persistence. Automation can deploy those updates at scale, helping you react faster than manual processes. On the risky side, fast updates can also propagate errors. If an intelligence feed is wrong or too broad, automated blocking can disrupt legitimate services. This is why confidence and validation are essential. You want the speed of automation, but you want controls that prevent unverified intelligence from causing harm. For beginners, a simple mental model is to treat external intelligence like a rumor until it matches something you can confirm locally or until it comes from a highly trusted source and is clearly relevant to your environment.

A balanced approach also includes measuring performance and learning over time. If you deploy automation or A I, you should be able to answer questions like how often did it reduce investigation time, how often did it produce false positives, and what actions had the highest cost when wrong. Even at a conceptual level, this mindset matters. It reminds you that tools need feedback loops. When an automated process produces too many noisy alerts, you adjust it. When an automated response is too aggressive, you add safeguards. When a model is missing certain attacks, you improve data collection or add complementary detections. This feedback mindset is the antidote to overtrust. Overtrust assumes the tool is finished and correct. Mature defense assumes the tool is always improving and always being checked.

By the end of this lesson, the point is not to fear automation or A I, and it is not to worship them either. Automation is excellent at repetitive, consistent tasks and can dramatically improve scale and speed. A I can help with pattern recognition, scoring, and summarization, but it remains dependent on data quality, context, and ongoing tuning. Overtrust is dangerous because it turns tool output into unquestioned truth and can either cause disruptive mistakes or create blind spots. The decision rule to remember is this: automate and use A I to accelerate low-risk steps like enrichment and grouping, and only allow high-impact automated actions when multiple independent signals create high confidence and you can verify outcomes quickly.