Meet BIX: Your New AI Ally in Cyber Risk and Exposure Management

What if I told you that managing cyber risk could be as easy as asking a colleague a question and getting a clear, actionable answer? Imagine having the ability to instruct your assistant to keep stakeholders informed about their responsibilities, deadlines, and provide periodic updates, all while enhancing your situational awareness. Picture every key player in cybersecurity—CISO, CIO, VM teams, security operations, IT staff, and legal teams—having their own AI assistants to help manage their part of the cyber risk puzzle, conversing in role-appropriate language.

Today, I am thrilled to share that this vision is now a reality with BIX, Balbix’s New AI Assistant for Cyber Risk and Exposure Management.

A New Dawn in Cyber Risk Management

Today, managing cyber risks involves a multitude of tasks: identifying vulnerabilities, analyzing threats, evaluating business impacts, and assessing security controls, and then performing appropriate risk mitigation actions. These tasks demand various tools, reports, and dedicated personnel, leading to a complex and time-consuming process. The challenge is exacerbated by the sheer volume of data and the difficulty in communicating risks to non-technical stakeholders.

For example, let’s take you back to Dec 11, 2021. This is the day when Log4j hit. In every enterprise a lot of people had questions about what was going on, and what they needed to do. For example, Maya, a CISO who I know, was worrying about the exposure from Log4j and the associated cyber risk, relative to everything else on the team’s plate. Maya cared just enough about the tech details about Log4j to get the job done.

The IT folks in her company wanted to know what specifically they needed to do to mitigate Log4j vulnerabilities. Their top concern was to not create additional issues for the business while fixing the security issue.

The picture above shows how BIX helps in such situations. For Maya, BIX explains “Log4j” simply as a set of critical CVEs and provides details on the financial impact, situational reality and mitigation options. BIX also offers to provide updates every 30 minutes as validation progresses or as new information becomes available.

For Peter, the IT guy, the conversation with BIX is focused on specific actions to mitigate the “Log4j” vulnerability. BIX provides specific technical details about patch availability and mitigating configuration settings, while offering to provide updates as the situation progresses. BIX adapts its communication to the specific needs and perspectives of different roles within an organization, providing tailored, actionable information to manage cybersecurity risks efficiently.

Simplifying Complexity with Conversational AI

Let’s peel the onion a bit into the need for a cybersecurity assistant.

1. Keep tabs on all relevant things. You want your AI assistant to continuously analyze all relevant data and bring to your attention things you need to worry about, not letting you get distracted or surprised. 
   
2. Be your thinking partner. Your AI assistant can serve as a discussion partner when you want to explore a few (perhaps even half-baked) ideas, helping you think through the pros and cons of these initiatives in the specfic context of your enterprise
3. Help get stuff done. Your virtual assistant can take care of creating all the dashboards and reporting templates, and fine tune the workflows and processes you need to get stuff done, including interactions with other stakeholders

BIX empowers every key player in cybersecurity—CISO, CIO, VM teams, security operations, IT staff, and legal teams—with their own AI assistants. These assistants converse in role-appropriate language, making it easier for each stakeholder to manage their part of the cyber risk puzzle effectively.

Here are the key capabilities of BIX:

• Personalization: BIX adapts its communication style, detail level, and recommendations based on the user’s role, preferences, and past interactions. For example, it can explain the financial impact of a threat like “Log4j” to executives in monetary terms while offering specific mitigation steps to IT staff.
• Context Awareness: Unlike generic tools, BIX integrates with your cybersecurity, IT, and business systems, providing insights into your assets, software versions, user roles, specific threats, and security measures. This context awareness allows BIX to offer tailored advice and mitigation strategies.
• Mobile Experience: We designed BIX to be a mobile first experience, you can access crucial information anytime, anywhere. This mobile capability enhances situational awareness and streamlines decision-making, saving hours of data gathering and analysis.
• Recommendations: BIX guides stakeholders with actionable insights and suggested questions, helping your organization transition from a threat-focused to a risk-based approach to cybersecurity. This executive assistant-like functionality ensures that even less experienced staff can contribute effectively to risk management.

Under the hood

Let’s take a look at how all this works…

BIX utilizes RAG-based Large Language Models (LLMs) running on specialized NVIDIA hardware. While standalone LLMs struggle with multi-step tasks requiring context navigation and privacy management, BIX’s multi-agent architecture excels by breaking down complex problems into discrete subtasks managed by specialized agents. This approach ensures a safe, accurate, and extensible solution for cybersecurity conversations and task automation. Figure 1 shows the internal architecture of BIX.

Unlike specialized cybersecurity assistants, like those just for cloud security, for incidence response or GRC, BIX is able to assist all stakeholders in your organization from within a single unified cyber risk model for your enterprise. This is because BIX leans on the Balbix Core for its knowledge about your specific enterprise environment – assets, software, apps, users, vulnerabilities, threats,  misconfigurations, controls, asset criticality, your remediation/mitigation workflows and systems. You can learn more about the AI capabilities of the Balbix Core here.

One point to note: we never use customer data to train our models, and we never run AI models on customer data outside of their tenant. Your confidentiality and privacy is top of mind for us, always.

Real-World Impact

Early users of BIX report significant improvements in their cyber risk and exposure management experiences. Decision-making and risk response times have decreased from days and weeks to mere minutes.

This picture below shows how BIX helped Maya with the PHP vulnerabilities a few days ago.

One question always top of mind for cybersecurity folks is: “what are my next best steps?” The picture below shows how BIX can help you with this question, and get into as much detail as you need, listing specific actions such as patching unpatched applications/operating systems, focusing on mission-critical and on-premise core assets, and addressing malware/ransomware-linked vulnerabilities. In this example, BIX also emphasizes improving visibility and focusing on critical vulnerabilities and linked issues.

This efficiency of understanding and decision making that BIX enables, coupled with Balbix’s comprehensive capabilities, translates into reduced risks and substantial productivity gains for your organization.

A Step Towards Proactive Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is inherently complex, demanding not only extensive automation but also simplification and streamlined communication. Since its founding, Balbix has used AI for computational tasks in cyber risk management and delivered significant value to our customers. Now, we are pioneering the use of AI to demystify the complexities of cyber risk for all stakeholders and enhance communication between them. This release of BIX is a key step forward in managing risk and exposures more effectively. It marks a significant development in our ability to be proactive, rather than reactive, in our cybersecurity efforts.

If you would like to know more about BIX or the Balbix platform, please visit Balbix.com and request a demo.