As AI-driven assaults add a new dimension to the escalating volume of cyberattacks, chief information security officers— and the traditional cybersecurity tools they rely on — are struggling to keep up.
According to Mike Denning, Chief Product Officer for Trinity Cyber, a key issue lies in the reactive nature of current security solutions. “It feels like, despite the fact we’re spending more money, we’re falling further and further behind,” he says in a recent CyberScoop podcast underwritten by Trinity Cyber. He attributed that to traditional security practices, which he likened to “driving a car while watching the rearview mirror.” Historically, security operations rely on indicators of compromise, like domain names or IP addresses, to block threats. Denning says this reliance leads to many false positives, diverting valuable time from security operators.
That’s why Trinity Cyber advocates for a fundamentally different and more proactive approach: Full Content Inspection (FCI). This technology, Denning explained, operates “right on the line of offensive cyber operations” and goes beyond inspection to include remediation in near real-time. “What the technology does is, we are interrogating content for every network session at Layer 2, and we’re looking at over 3,400 fields,” he says. Unlike signature-based methods, FCI examines data as it flows, proactively editing out malicious traffic while allowing legitimate user activity to continue uninterrupted.
A prime example of FCI’s effectiveness was reflected in Trinity Cyber’s response to the Log4j vulnerability. Denning highlighted how Trinity Cyber was able to update its customers’ defenses within four hours of the vulnerability’s discovery. “We’re able to look for those indicators of compromise, the packets that indicated that Log4j was attempted to be exploited, [and] we were able to edit those out and push an update to all of our customers within four hours of Log4j being discovered as a level 10 incident,” he explains.
This proactive approach significantly reduces alert fatigue, a common pain point for security teams. Denning reported that while about 30% of alerts are historically false positives, Trinity Cyber has seen a false positive rate of less than 0.01%. “With full content inspection, we essentially eliminate that alert fatigue because it doesn’t require the team to take action,” he says, stressing that it’s imperceptible to the end user because it’s done in near real time.
Because Trinity Cyber’s FCI is delivered as a fully managed service with a “collective defense model,” countermeasures developed for any customer, including zero-day exploits, are instantaneously deployed across all customers. This unified defense focuses on the tactics, techniques and procedures of threat actors, which are significantly harder for hackers to change than easily modified hash algorithms by AI-powered tools.
“Because we’re not looking at those hash algorithms, we’re able to actually do it number one — faster — but number two, more accurately,” says Denning. “And number three, it makes it significantly harder for the [hackers] doing it.”
Ultimately, FCI empowers organizations to navigate the complex digital landscape with unprecedented confidence, making security a tangible, continuously optimized advantage.
Listen to the full podcast conversation here. And learn more about Trinity Cyber’s Full Content Inspection technology.
This podcast was produced by Scoop News Group for CyberScoop and sponsored by Trinity Cyber.
