AI Guardians: Safeguarding Cyber Realms with VeeMost CEO Melvin Ejiogu

0:00Today on the podcast, we have the pleasure of talking with Melvin who is an IT and cybersecurity expert. He runs a firm out of New Jersey. So today we're going to be diving into how we see AI and cybersecurity and this field going forward into the future. Welcome to the show, Melvin. Thank you, Jaden. Thank you. So, Melvin, would you mind telling us a little bit about your background and kind of what got you interested in this in the first place? Yes. So my name is Melvin Ejogu. I have been in the IT industry for a very long time. I think since 1998, something like that. And as the IT industry has evolved, I have also evolved with it.

0:47Cybersecurity is obviously a hot topic, but it has always been a topic for us because when we build networks, we have to secure it. So I started on my cybersecurity journey maybe over 20 years ago. Right now, I run a company called Vemos Technologies. We specialize in delivering digital services and solutions that transform business. So any business that is on that digital transformational journey, that's where we come in. We can help them assess the solutions that they want to implement. We can design it, plan it, implement it, and manage it for them. So that's typically my background. I have a lot of the IT certifications.

1:37Personally, everyone in my team has some kind of a certification that will help companies to get them to where they need to be. That's very cool. What kind of got you interested in IT and cybersecurity at the beginning? For me, IT, I don't know. I mean, I've always liked technology. I think I just gravitated towards technology. Maybe it was a gift. I don't know. But cybersecurity, it was something that needed to happen, right? You build something, you got to protect it. So when we realized that after building something, if you don't secure that, someone else can come in and tear it completely down.

2:25So that's when I started my cybersecurity journey. And plus it paid good too. Yeah, right. Totally. And I think that it's really interesting because I feel like this is an area that is just becoming increasingly important today as we kind of see everything happening. How do you think AI, you know, ChatGPT and tools like it really have kind of changed the landscapes and the types of cybersecurity threats that companies are seeing today? um well ai uh chat gpt let's talk about chat gpt for example right so yeah um you know we've always we've we've used search engines for a long for decades now right so a lot of us learned um you know learn things through google you just google it right that it's become a term google it right So a lot of people that started using ChatGPT, for example, started using it because of the search capabilities.

3:26But platforms like ChatGPT take the search, take all of that to the next level, right? Because you can control how the conversation goes, right? And for those in coding or in the software business, when you use tools like ChatGPT, when you use them well, those tools can understand codes and they can even locate hidden malware codes, right? And they can provide insights and help tell you how to solve problems. And so using tools like that can actually help the operator become a little bit more efficient. And then on the other side, right, since, you know, AI, chat, GPT, all of that stuff is also a double-edged sword, right?

4:16Because criminals are also using it, right? So if criminals are using it to try to find better ways to attack you, you got to also try to use it to stay ahead of the game. Otherwise, you're going to get, you're not going to like what's going to happen, right? So what do you think like the main use cases or concerns with, you know, like chat GPT or something, a cyber criminal? What are, I guess, is it like phishing attacks? Is it, I guess, like what level of sophistication does something like chat GPT add or what kinds of things can cyber criminals use it for? You know, they can use it to, I don't know if you know this, but you can actually, you can actually, chat GPT can actually go through codes for you.

5:04it can actually pump out codes. Yeah. Now, I know that as this technology matures, the quality of codes that it will be able to pump out is going to be crazy. So automation, you know, there's a lot of... I think, I mean, right now, I would say it's probably only 20 % what it can do, if not less. So the future of things like ChatGPT is even greater than what it is right now. Yeah, that's crazy. So I would say given the increasing complexity and sophistication of cyber threats, what strategies should businesses implement to effectively combat these, do you think? Yeah, cyber threats, they're becoming very complex.

6:01and sophisticated. So every company has to at least prioritize cybersecurity measures, right? You have your access controls. They have to have robust and effective access controls. They also have to, you got to train your users, right? So there has to be regular security awareness training because if your users don't know that they can become the weakest link, you spend all that money and then somebody that's not aware of what's going on can be your weakest link and you can get hacked through that. Also, a big one is multi-factor authentication, right? That is huge. That is huge because someone can brute force a password attack, but if they don't have If the other stuff, which is typically biometric or like a phone, something, then they can't really come in, right?

7:05The typical, which is keeping your software up to date, I think you would be surprised at how much damage could be done when companies leave their software unattended, right? So you could, a lot of these stuff that people are always trying to figure out ways to hack them. So if your stuff is three years old and you haven't touched it, you haven't patched it, that could be a way people can get in. So you got to always keep your stuff up to date. And also the biggest one is when you get hacked, right? What do you do? So I think a lot of companies don't have some kind of an incidence response plan.

7:48So I think you got to have it mapped out what you will do if you get hacked and who call the whole nine yards. Yeah, I mean, and especially as I feel like these attacks are becoming a little bit more prevalent and perhaps more, like you said, a little bit more complex with AI and other tools. You know, from your vantage point, what you're seeing, you know, as the CEO of a tech company and specifically one that focuses and deals with cybersecurity, how do you kind of see the role of AI in cybersecurity evolving over the next, let's say, like five years? And I guess, I'll ask it from two sides. Number one, where do you see the threats coming over the next five years?

8:32How do you see this? What's the implication of this technology getting better? And then maybe after that, we can talk about how you see AI helping with those problems. Well, so when you do a research, you find out that businesses are spending billions on AI and automation technologies, right? So I think I was reading somewhere on Forbes magazine, they are forecasting that AI technology alone is set to become a$500 billion market by 2025. Holy cow, that's a lot of money, right? Right. So at Forbes, we have come to trust what they say, right? Right. So with that kind of money, AI is not going anywhere anytime soon.

9:14It's going to play a crucial role in helping organizations protect their network. So I think that AI is going to be crucial, especially in cybersecurity. I think so. Because, look, like I said, I was talking to a gentleman a couple weeks ago. With AI platforms, one of the things that it does is it allows for the processing of data at an alarming speed, right? So anything that can process data that quickly, and when you couple that with machine learning, I think this future, the future of AI is something that's going to be incredible. Okay, yeah. And so, I mean, off the top of my head, I've heard a few different, I'd be curious to hear your take and what your thoughts are on these, you know, being so unprofessional in the field.

10:04But a few different cybersecurity issues I've seen specifically with AI, one of them being I think there was a recent incident where there was like a scammer or something that called a mom and it was in the voice of her daughter and it was asking for like help. She was in trouble. She needed money. She needed something. something and of course this is more like a family thing but i can see how this could be very easily um manipulated in for enterprise or the corporate side where essentially you get a call from your boss and he's like hey sorry i divorced someone else's phone but i really need you to like wire this money to do this thing blah blah but of course today with these new ai systems we have of course ai voice cloning and some of them um you know you can clone someone's voice with as little as five seconds of audio and if you want a great clone it's five minutes of audio how do you how How do you recommend or I guess what are your thinking around issues like that, right?

10:59That could be very confusing and a lot of people just are prepared for those types of cybersecurity threats. I know, I know. I mean, you just see there's always got to be a human aspect to it, right? So if someone calls me, I still have to be able to, based on the personality of that person, be able to know that this is wrong. This is not the person, right? So, for example, even in cybersecurity, one of the things is the track detection, right? So, when you have a threshold, when you have already the way that the system behaves, so if the system begins to act a different way, your solution should be able to catch it and realize something is off, right?

11:44So if someone calls me, pretend it's with my brother or my dad, of course, it's not just the voice that makes a person, right? There's other things that makes a person. So I should be able to detect right away that, hey, you might have my dad's voice, but you're not my dad, right? Right, right. So the human aspect of all of this stuff should be considered. AI is not going to take away our jobs. It's not going to replace everything. And so we should always always use common sense also, you know, for things like that. Do you think the threat is more in things like, you know, potentially like that where it's kind of social engineering?

12:20I mean, I remember my first corporate job. I don't know what it was like. Our other emails for our company got leaked to some database, but we would routinely get a couple emails a day that would be like, you know, addressed from my CEO at my company and be like, hey, I need this urgently. can you give me a call this is my phone number and like you know i don't know they're like i just get those all the time and of course everyone in the company is like hey this is cyber security stuff i'm actually pretty sure it department would send stuff out like that just to like test us too so maybe that one's part of it um but in any case do you think these cyber security threats from ai there's of course the social engineering side of it right like that and like the the voice calls and that kind of stuff do you think that's the issue or do you think just the ai is going to use machine learning to have a really ed you know advanced algorithms that's going to be able to like brute force hack into things or kind of wreak havoc from that side?

13:10You know, the problem with things like this, the problem with technology, especially with technology that's powered by things like AI, machine learning, is that they also have the ability to learn, right, to adjust, right? So when hackers use things like that and companies that focus on cybersecurity, when they come up with solutions, these hackers using AI technology could also evade those strategies, right? So it's always going to be a constant battle between the good and the bad guys, right? So it's, and especially with the way the, with the way cybersecurity crimes are now, where there's an on the ground world where they trade ideas and, and help each other out.

13:57It's, it's going to be everything. It's not just going to be the emails. It's not going to be the phishing. Cloud security is also huge. Cryptocurrency is also making it hard to track these people. So it's going to be a combination of everything, to be honest. um yeah i think uh i think it's gonna be really interesting and so i know this is this is kind of brand new so i'm not i don't expect you to have a specific response to this but i'm not sure if you've seen in the news lately there's been a lot of talk about um potentially new material for quantum computing and quantum conductivity have you seen anything about that and if so i wonder if you have thought about the implications that you know something like that might have on ai and on cybersecurity?

14:53I've seen that. I've seen that. And quite frankly, it's still new to me. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of that. But look, I think this whole thing is going to continue to grow and there's going to be one day we'll be able to go to the movement. I don't know. Right, right. Yeah. I don't know what. I think it would be too early for me to speak. Okay, for sure. So one question I would be curious in asking you, because you talk a little bit about the benefits and the risks of AI and ChaiChipity and stuff. Is there anything your company is currently doing to kind of leverage AI in helping with cybersecurity?

15:35Yes. So for us, we have a product that actually leverages. We have a current product that people can actually go to a website right now, subscribe to, help when they're browsing the Internet, right? It's called Visha. And in the background, it leverages AI. All it does is there's a bunch of data that it has collected about good and bad sites, and it can use AI to make decisions as to whether the site you're going to is a pretty good site or it's a bad site, right? So there's a couple stuff out there, but this is a pretty simple stuff. You can install it. You could actually, it's cloud-based, so just subscribe.

16:23Just subscribe. You could do it at home or at work. That's one way that we are leveraging AI. We also have a solution, a line of business that we actually should be launching pretty soon. In the background, that's also leveraging AI. So for us, we just leverage AI tools that other people build. If we haven't really come to build our own AI, we're not at that level where we build up like a chat GPT, anything like that. But we just leverage what other people have built. Yeah, but actually, I think that's a really cool concept, the vShield thing, because essentially, right, you could take a massive corpus of data and say, look, here's like 100 ,000 websites.

17:11These are all the components of a good, normal website. These are websites that we've vetted as very good. And then you could go, here's 100 ,000 phishing websites. Here's all the components of these dangerous websites. What makes them dangerous, how you can detect them, run that through an AI. And then you don't have to make a list of it. Because, of course, hackers and cybersecurity people are, you know, like hackers and malicious actors are going to constantly be coming up with new URLs. Right. It's impossible to essentially make a database of every bad site in the world to alert people. That's a really cool concept to train an AI off of bad ones so it can detect and let people know.

17:47You know, I think that's kind of interesting, too, because you see with like a lot of phishing sites, people think like, oh, I'm just going to like my supplier's website or I'm just going to, you know, Facebook or Google. or like a basic site they trust, but it's just a clone of the site. And, you know, there's maybe a typo in the URL. And so, yeah, that's really interesting because you could essentially just have an AI to detect and tell you even when, you know, everything else seems perfectly normal and fine. You're just logging into your website, but it's really phishing. Ah, very cool. Thank you.

18:16And, you know, we use it at home. We use it at home. We use it in the office. When you have little kids, especially, you just want to be able to control what's going on in your house and what's going on. work. So it comes in handy. Very cool. I love that. So, you know, if people are interested in, you know, getting in contact with you, learning more, or perhaps using your company, where is the best place for people to find you? We have a website, www.vmost.com, v-e-e-m-o-s-t dot com that is best way to find us um our contact information is on there um all all our social media handles are on there too okay well thank you so much for coming on the show today melvin it's been absolutely amazing and for all of the listeners thank you so much for listening to the ai chat podcast make sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to your podcasts and have a wonderful rest of your day