Odell Tuttle, Chief Technology Officer, Avionté
A recent news headline grabbed many people’s attention: close to 30 global corporations were hacked by Chinese threat actors using large-language-model AI to automate the attacks. The first reaction from many — including members of the media — was predictable: AI is on a path to cause unprecedented harm to our society.
I get it. The story is alarming. But here’s what I want you to understand: it’s also incomplete.
Yes, hackers have become more sophisticated. Yes, they’re using AI to build out their attacks. But here’s another truth that doesn’t make headlines as often: the same technology that can be used as a weapon can also be used as a shield — if you have the right tools and support on your side.
This is why we’ve been discussing the importance of selecting the right technology partner. In many of our recent posts, we’ve discussed why self-hosted or homegrown platforms can be dangerous in today’s threat landscape.
You’re not fighting against young hackers in a basement anymore. You’re fighting against sophisticated international conglomerates — people working in well-lit offices who receive benefits, vacation time, and even customer support.
To protect yourself, you need to use the same tools they’re using to attack you.
As I shared at CONNECT and in a recent interview, our approach at Avionté starts with an AI-native foundation. AI can deliver real value to staffing companies, but only when it sits atop a secure, adaptable, and tightly integrated platform. Avionté delivers the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end staffing platform — one where security isn’t bolted on but baked into every layer.
At Avionté, security isn’t an afterthought — it’s built into the architecture. And we’re using AI and machine learning in advanced ways to spot anomalies, anticipate risks, and respond faster than traditional systems ever could.
Here are two of the ways we use AI to enhance our security. Each of these tools uses pattern recognition to identify unusual activity and flag potential attempts to access or compromise your data.
AWS Shield Advanced provides continuous, AI-driven protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks — one of the most common ways attackers attempt to overwhelm and shut down systems.
It constantly monitors incoming traffic to your AWS resources, using machine-learning models trained on years of global attack data. These models learn what normal traffic looks like for your specific application and spot deviations — sudden spikes, unusual request patterns, or signs of automated botnets.
When something stands out, Shield responds automatically to mitigate the threat. It can block suspicious IP addresses, limit request rates, and reroute traffic within seconds, without waiting for manual intervention. Because it adapts to your baseline, it also reduces false alarms that often come with older, static rulesets.
Best part: Shield’s protection improves and adapts over time. It actually stays ahead of emerging threats by learning from each new attack. This means that as attacks evolve, so do the protection mechanisms. If AWS detects a new type of DDoS attack anywhere in its global network, that intelligence is incorporated into the detection models used across all Shield customers. It also integrates directly with AWS WAF and CloudFront to create a layered defense that stops malicious traffic earlier in the pipeline.
The result is a system that scales with your platform, responds immediately when something’s off, and continually improves its accuracy. AWS Shield Advanced blends cutting-edge AI and machine learning with human expertise, providing proactive, automated protection against both known and emerging DDoS threats while keeping your platform secure and available.
CrowdStrike Falcon adds a powerful layer of defense by watching how your endpoints actually behave. Instead of relying on signatures, Falcon’s AI-driven models monitor activity across your workstations, servers, and cloud instances in real time. It looks for the things traditional tools miss — unusual network connections, odd file changes, processes trying to escalate privileges, or anything that doesn’t align with normal patterns. That’s how it catches zero-day attacks, ransomware, and malware variants before they execute.
Falcon’s intelligence gets stronger because it’s fueled by data from millions of endpoints around the world. Its machine-learning models correlate signals, identify attacker techniques, and map behaviors back to known threat groups. When Falcon detects a new tactic anywhere in its ecosystem, that insight is pushed instantly across all protected endpoints, giving you collective defense at a global scale.
For ransomware, that type of intelligence pays off quickly. Falcon can spot early signs like mass file modifications or suspicious encryption attempts and stop the process before it has a chance to spread. It also excels at detecting modern, multi-stage attacks — including fileless malware and threats that live entirely in memory.
And because Falcon is fully cloud-native, it updates continuously, shares intelligence in real time, and delivers consistent protection without heavy agents or manual patching. The more activity it sees, the sharper its detection becomes, strengthening your defenses with every new signal.
In short, CrowdStrike Falcon combines real-time behavioral monitoring, AI-driven threat intelligence, and machine learning to protect your systems from a wide range of cyber threats. It doesn’t just detect attacks — it responds, contains, and even predicts them faster and more accurately than traditional, signature-based tools. By continuously learning from activity across millions of endpoints, Falcon gets smarter over time, helping your team stay ahead of emerging threats and keeping your systems secure.
Recent headlines have prompted real concerns about how AI is being used in attacks. What they often miss is how central AI has become to defense as well. The technology that fuels these threats is the same technology helping stop them.
AI-powered attacks are real, but so are the defenses designed to counter them. When you partner with a tech company whose platform is built on an AI-native architecture and supported by enterprise-grade tools, AI becomes a protective layer rather than a vulnerability.
AWS Shield Advanced and CrowdStrike Falcon are two examples of the systems we use to protect our clients. They’re fast, adaptive, and continually improving based on global intelligence — capabilities that older systems simply can’t match.
Security today isn’t something you bolt on or piece together. It demands integrated technology, strong partnerships, and a platform built to evolve as threats escalate. Enterprise-level protection requires partners with the resources, expertise, and infrastructure to keep pace with attacks that shift by the day. Because in a landscape that never stops changing, anything less leaves you exposed.
And that’s what we’re building for you. An AI-native platform that’s secure by design, protected by the most advanced AI-driven security tools available, and backed by a team that takes your trust seriously.
Odell Tuttle
Chief Technology Officer at Avionté
Odell Tuttle oversees the technology teams, tools, and processes that provide the foundation of the Avionté platform. This includes software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and information technology. Odell brings over 28 years of experience building and operating large-scale software platforms.
