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Cyber Thoughts

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Ten years ago, the idea that software was taking over everything was a provocative statement, but today it is common wisdom. The new version of this idea is more like Generative AI is eating software and business. We are seeing Large Language Models (LLMs), epitomized by ChatGPT, being used to generate everything from blog posts to code.

It seems like every journalist and writer is now using ChatGPT to generate some part of their article to either show the power of the tool or its limitations. Just last month, we faced off against ChatGPT for our 2023 predictions. At the time we thought that was the cutting edge, but it didn’t take long for that to be played out.

When it comes to code, programmers have been using a LLM tool called Copilot to assist in writing code. Copilot, which is a Microsoft Github product, is actually quite powerful and many programmers find its level of automation unnerving. Just how much of a programmer’s job will LLM tools end up automating?

Finally, a few companies have announced that they will be using LLMs to assist cybersecurity practitioners with tasks ranging from remediating configuration errors to responding to security incidents. The efficacy of these tools remains to be seen, but by the end of 2023 we expect some form of AI support to be commonplace amongst cybersecurity solutions.

Below are a few of the articles that caught our attention this month. Moreover, we’ve inserted one or two sentences in italics, summarizing each article’s importance. We hope you enjoy and appreciate the material.

What We're Reading

Here's a curated list of things we found interesting.

Orca Security deploys ChatGPT to secure the cloud with AI

We are about to see an explosion of the use of LLMs in cybersecurity products; this may be the first announcement, but only time will tell if this extension will provide actual value beyond the marketing hype.

Orca announced it would be the first cloud security company to implement a ChatGPT extension. The integration will process security alerts and provide users with step-by-step remediation instructions.

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Phone Malware Takes Over Home Routers

Have you changed your router password? We didn't think so, but your router could be hacked by any phone that connects to it thanks to this phone malware. Go ahead and change your password, we'll wait.

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Microsoft Preps ChatGPT-Powered Bing Search

We can’t believe it either, but it looks like Bing is about to become relevant. Microsoft is a key investor in OpenAI and they plan to bring the technology to consumers. Bing will use GPT-4, the next generation of the machine learning model used in OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, to generate human-like, sentences in response to search queries. But unlike ChatGPT, which was trained on internet data from 2021, Bing will answer questions with real-time information and cite sources for its answers.

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Transactions

Deals that caught our eye.

Thoma Bravo expands cybersecurity reach with $1.34B Magnet Forensics deal 

Thoma Bravo will buy Canadian software firm Magnet Forensics in a C$1.8 billion ($1.34 billion) deal, as the private equity firm bolsters its cybersecurity portfolio to tap into rising demand.

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Podcasts

What we're listening to.

Cyber Thoughts Podcast: Episode 2 with JP Bourget

In this episode, we speak with JP Bourget: virtual CISO, industry expert, and recovering SOAR founder. We discuss JP's unorthodox career progression and explore how Microsoft is set to take over the security market using software bundling. JP provides unique insights given his history as a founder paired with his experiences working with multiple companies at a high level; we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

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Intangibles Podcast and ChatGPT

We at Lytical Ventures have been testing out what Chat-GPT can do.  We took all the episodes of The Intangibles Podcast and made them queryable. Type any question into the chat box and get the episode information, the applicable text and an augmented answer from Chat-GPT. We will eventually be adding this to the podcast website. Ignore what it says about only being 2 episodes.

About Lytical

Lytical Ventures is a New York City-based venture firm investing in Corporate Intelligence, comprising cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. Lytical’s professionals have decades of experience in direct investing generally and in Corporate Intelligence specifically.