The war against cyber attackers isn’t a fair battle. Companies have to defend against all attacks, while the attackers only have to get through once. And it’s about to get much, much worse.
The same artificial intelligence technologies used to power speech recognition, self-driving cars, and “deep fake” videos have the potential to be turned to other uses, like creating viruses that morph faster than antivirus companies can keep up, phishing emails that are indistinguishable from real messages written by humans, and intelligently going after a data center’s entire perimeter to find the smallest vulnerability and then use it to burrow in.
“We already know that a skilled and determined human attacker is the most difficult to catch,” said Ryan Shaw, co-founder at Bionic, a Washington, DC-based cybersecurity startup. “However, much like defenders, our adversaries have a scaling problem — there is only so much time and skill to go around.”
