Zespri sees fruitful combination of AI and XDR

Kiwifruit marketer Zespri is using AI capabilities in an eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to reduce the workload of its cyber security team, and to better understand the threat landscape it operates in.

Image credit: Zespri

The complexity of Zespri's supply chain and the perishable nature of its products mean every step must be taken to minimise possible disruptions – and that includes those arising from cyber-attacks. 

Each year the New Zealand-based agribusiness produces around 3.7 billion kiwifruits which are shipped to consumers in more than 50 countries. 

For head of digital operations Tim Lloyd, quickly knowing which signals to respond to and which to ignore has become a critical requirement. 

"We integrate with a lot of customers and parts of our value chain, and so we get ingestion alerts from all of those avenues," Lloyd said. "It's really important for us, in the event of an alert, to understand where it's coming from and how to stop it or identify it as a false positive really quickly, because the knock-on effects could be really dramatic. 

"A minute is a long time in the world of cybersecurity, and it's also a long time when you have a boat being loaded with a perishable product." 

According to Lloyd, one of the key benefits of XDR is its incorporation of AI to assess and respond to threats. 

"The evidence of that is that we are getting less false positives now, and more meaningful alerts and actionable items," Lloyd said. 

"We haven't had anything to investigate for the past four-and-a-half weeks as a result of the fact that XDR is doing some of that work upfront." 

For Lloyd and his team, the use of AI means they can spend less time chasing ghosts. 

"The team can be more focused on broader activities within the security sphere – on outputs and experiences and performance and usability of our solution sets – as opposed to alerts and monitors and chasing a user down to ask them if they actually are in Zimbabwe at this moment," Lloyd said.  

Lloyd's experiences with AI so far give him confidence that the technology would grow progressively smarter in terms of how it assesses alerts and manages vulnerabilities, potentially further reducing risk to Zespri's supply chain from cyber attacks. 

Lloyd said he was also aware however that AI capabilities were also in the hands of cybercriminals, and hence he believed it was critical for any cyber professional to investigate what AI could deliver for them today. 

"If you're targeted with the tools that the bad guys have easily at their disposal now, and you're not leveraging something at least similar, then you're done," Lloyd said. 

"We need to adopt and use it and leverage it based on what us and our peers are discovering and put trust in a partner and a product vendor that is also doing the same, because otherwise we'd be left behind."