#313 Evan Reiser: How Abnormal AI Protects Humans with Behavioral AI

In this episode of Eye on AI, we sit down with Evan Reiser, co-founder and CEO of Abnormal AI, to unpack how AI has fundamentally changed the cybersecurity landscape.

 

We explore why social engineering remains the most costly form of cybercrime, how generative AI has lowered the barrier for sophisticated attacks, and why humans have become the primary attack surface in modern security. Evan explains why traditional, signature-based defenses fall short, how behavioral AI detects threats that have never existed before, and what it means to build security systems that understand how people actually work and communicate.

 

The conversation also looks ahead at the AI arms race between attackers and defenders, the economics driving cybercrime, and what it truly means to be an AI-native company operating at scale.

 

This episode is a deep dive into the human side of AI security and why the future of cybersecurity depends less on code and more on behavior.

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(00:00) Abnormal AI's origin

(02:31) Why phishing is still the biggest threat

(05:57) How attackers manipulate human trust

(10:05) The true cost of social engineering

(11:58) Vendor account compromise explained

(15:02) How AI changed cyber attacks

(16:28) Behavioral security vs traditional defenses

(19:55) Where Abnormal fits in the security stack

(22:24) Human psychology as the attack surface

(24:01) Why cyber defense is asymmetric

(28:48) Humans as the new zero-day

(31:01) Why attackers target people, not systems

(33:21) Behavioral modeling from ads to security

(36:10) Why money drives almost all attacks

(40:06) What happens after credentials are stolen

(42:18) Text scams and lateral movement

(43:55) What it means to be AI-native

(47:13) How Abnormal uses AI internally