Trend Micro taps Nvidia software tools for AI cybersecurity offering

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) -Trend Micro on Sunday said it is working with Nvidia to create new cybersecurity tools that use artificial intelligence and are designed to protect the data centers where AI work happens.

The tools, which Trend Micro planned to show at the Computex conference in Taiwan beginning on Sunday, will be capable of running on Nvidia's chips and are designed to detect intruders and make sure that data is only seen by those authorized to use it.

Many businesses are training AI systems to help their employees with tasks like answering human resources questions or assisting customer service agents. But to do so, the businesses often pull data from across their business into one place, which makes the system an alluring target for hackers.

"They work their way into the enterprise and they find this massive honeypot of information," Trend Micro Chief Operating Officer Kevin Simzer told Reuters.

In addition to detecting intruders, another area that Trend Micro will focus on is ensuring that data that gets fed into AI systems doesn't get snooped on by hackers. For most modern chatbots, users interact with the bot by asking it questions - and many times the questions themselves can contain sensitive information, either in the form of undisclosed corporate secrets or private customer data.

"They're often narrowing the scope of (a chatbot's responses) by giving some very, very specific information," Simzer said of the use of AI prompts. "That's what we're going to be looking for and making sure that we see it first and we can make sure that it doesn't go any further" than the people and applications authorized to see it, Simzer said.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)