Socket CEO says AI is ‘moving very quickly’

The founder and executive president (CEO) of Socket, a “startup” that discovers security vulnerabilities in open source code, believes in an interview with Lusa that generative artificial intelligence (AI) is “evolving very quickly.”

AI is “developing very quickly, so no one knows the future, but I’m very excited” because “at least it’s making software development much more accessible to people, democratizing it,” says Ferosse Abouhadieh, who took part in this year’s at the premiere of the web summit.

In other words, it turns the aspiring software developer into a middleman and so on, he argues.

“And even for me, working in the field” for a long time, [a IA] helps you get things done faster,” he continues, noting that from a security perspective it can be used to “explore large amounts of data and look for anomalies.” For example, in the case of open source, where “there is so much code on the Internet that no one person can look at all of it,” he says.

Despite the benefits of artificial intelligence, Socket’s CEO warns that “certain types of security programs” could “get worse,” namely “phishing” cyberattacks.

This is because most “phishing” attacks these days are “mass-based”, so this type of “fishing” to access sensitive information is sent to a huge group of people and one of them is expected to fall for the scheme.

With the advent of AI, attacks are becoming more sophisticated, such as “spear phishing,” which targets a specific person or group and includes personalized information of interest to the target, which can even include financial documents, making it “100 times more convincing.”

In this sense, AI will “unfortunately make these types of attacks easier,” he said.

As for Socket, which raised $20 million in Series A in August, he says it’s “a tool that helps developers write secure ‘software’ and does it in a way that helps them work faster and doesn’t slow them down or create a lot of security work.

“We have clients in Europe and Portugal. Since we are new, we are currently focused more on companies in North America, New York and California, but we also have many clients in Europe,” says Abouhadieh.

The person in charge notes that the “big problem” with the “software” is that the way it is written “changes very quickly, which raises security issues.”

“What has changed now is the way open source is created, and the barrier to entry has lowered. This way, anyone can create an open source project in two clicks,” he says.

So companies use code that “was written by others,” and this “increases security risks,” he points out.

Another problem is that the startup speed is higher, making it difficult to test each one.

Feros Abukhadia’s name was thrust into the spotlight in the tech world when he developed Youtube Instant while still a college student.

“Basically what happened was I studied computer science at university. [Stanford]“And Google just launched a new product called Google Instant,” he says.

To speed up Google searches, the company has moved to create a YouTube version.

“It took me three hours to build,” and “everyone thought it was impressive,” he continues.

The story is simple: “I bet a friend that I could do this in an hour, I lost the bet, but when I posted the “link” on Twitter. [atual X] and on Facebook we went to bed and the next morning I woke up and the media was ‘crazy’ about it and I didn’t know why,” he recalls.

And then YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley messaged him “saying he was amazing” and tried to hire him.