Digital Encode deploys platform to help businesses fight AI-driven cybercrime

Digital Encode, a Nigerian cybersecurity company says it has deployed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform to help organisations fight increasingly sophisticated cybercrime.

The Chief Executive Officer of Digital Encode, Prof. Adewale Obadare, said this in a statement on Tuesday.

Obadare said the platform, DEPAS AI was designed to help organisations move from periodic manual security checks to continuous testing of their systems and networks.

Obadare said DEPAS AI, meaning Digital Encode Penetration Autonomous System, was built to provide continuous and autonomous cybersecurity testing.

He said the platform came as AI was increasingly being used by cybercriminals to launch faster and more sophisticated attacks against organisations.

According to him, AI enabled breaches now account for 25 per cent of all malicious incidents, representing a 56 per cent year on year increase.

He said the average cost of AI enabled breaches had reached 6.04 million dollars, compared with the global average of 4.99 million dollars.

Obadare said attack activity was highest in North America at 29 per cent, followed by Asia Pacific at 27 per cent and Europe at 25 per cent.

He said the Middle East and Africa accounted for 10 per cent of attack activity, while Latin America accounted for nine per cent.

He said the figures showed that AI-driven cyber threats were spreading across regions and required stronger and faster protection.

He said the platform deployed specialised AI security agents that worked at the same time across an organisation’s entire attack surface.

According to him, an AI coordinator manages the operation, keeps track of the systems being tested, analyses results and deploys additional agents when deeper checks are required.

He said every vulnerability identified by the platform was independently tested by another agent to reduce false positives and ensure that reported weaknesses were genuine.

Obadare said the platform also used a chain builder to connect separate vulnerabilities and show how attackers could combine them to achieve a successful attack.

“AI is now being weaponised by attackers to move faster than human teams can respond,” Obadare said.

He said DEPAS AI combined Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence to give organisations the speed and scale required to defend against modern cyber threats.

Obadare said the platform could test enterprise applications, web applications, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), mobile applications and backend systems.

He said DEPAS AI could also test cloud environments and network or Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure for possible weaknesses.

According to him, the platform provides 24-hour testing across applications, cloud systems and network assets.

He said its independent verification system helped to reduce unnecessary alerts and allowed security teams to focus on genuine vulnerabilities.

Obadare noted that DEPAS AI could map attack chains and show how separate weaknesses could be linked and exploited by cybercriminals.

He added that the platform also produced executive-ready reports, remediation guidance and compliance mapping to help organisations act on identified risks.

“With DEPAS AI, we are reimagining penetration testing for the AI era,” he said.

Obadare said Digital Encode aimed to equip enterprises in Nigeria and other parts of the world with tools to detect, prioritise and fix cyber risks before they were exploited.

News men reports that Digital Encode is a cybersecurity professional services company providing cybersecurity, information technology governance, risk management and related services.