Capital One and USAA Invest in Security Firm Tidal Cyber

Security firm Tidal Cyber says it has landed investments from Capital One and USAA.

The investments will help enhance the company’s enterprise edition platform and fuel the adoption of Tidal’s “threat-informed defense” offering, according to a Monday (Oct. 28) news release.

In addition the investments will help accelerate Tidal’s go-to-market activities and product development, including expanding sales and marketing activities and enhancements to its Community Edition, which supports more than 3,000 security professionals around the world, per the release.

“We have witnessed Tidal Cyber drive the adoption of Threat-Informed Defense since the very early days of the company and have been impressed by the company’s rapid growth. With that up-front perspective, it was a natural decision to invest,” Nathan McKinley, USAA vice president and head of corporate development, said in the release.

The investment comes as cyberattacks continue to grow in cost amid increases in digitization and artificial intelligence (AI), as noted here earlier this month.

“If cybercrime damage were a state, it would be the world’s third-largest economy,” Bank of America wrote in a recent investors note.

The financial institution added that 60% of organizations were impacted by ransomware in 2023, the average payment jumping fivefold compared to the previous year. Meanwhile the average cost of a data breach has climbed by 10% this year.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last month about the use of AI chatbots by criminals to create sophisticated malware.

As that report noted, HP Wolf Security researchers have found one of the first known instances where attackers employed generative AI to write malicious code for distributing a remote access Trojan. This marks a shift in cybersecurity, democratizing the ability to develop complex malware and potentially threatening a surge in cybercrime.

“If your company is like many others, hackers have infiltrated a tool your software development teams are using to write code. Not a comfortable place to be,” Lou Steinberg, founder and managing partner at CTM Insights and former CTO of TD Ameritrade, told PYMNTS.

Developers often use AI chatbots like ChatGPT for code generation and translation between programming languages, though this reliance comes with risk, as these AI tools learn from a massive amount of open-source software, which could contain design errors, bugs, or even deliberately inserted malware.

“Letting open-source train your AI tools is like letting a bank-robbing getaway driver teach high school driver’s ed. It has a built-in bias to teach something bad,” Steinberg warned.

With more than a billion open-source contributions made a year, the threat of malicious code worming its way into AI training data is significant.