When AIs go to war: Autonomous cyber weapons ‘inevitable’
Summary
Speaking at the supplier’s annual CloudSec event in London, Ferguson said that today, AI in the enterprise has not really advanced far beyond machine learning techniques for analysing large data pools, and is certainly nowhere near reaching Hal 9000 or Skynet-like capabilities. When threat-modelling from a cyber security perspective, you are suddenly going to find yourself in a world where you have to take AI models of thinking into account.” Ferguson told his audience that once AI can be leveraged properly by cyber criminals, CISOs can expect their organisations to be subject to AI attacks that move much faster, contain context-aware malicious code, and adapt themselves to impersonate different people within an organisation to attract the attention of a target in a phishing scam, or pretend to be a standard penetration testing tool to gain access to a network. Ferguson gave the example of the widespread and dangerous Emotet trojan, which, since it emerged five years ago, has become, to some extent, able to adapt itself to its circumstances – lying dormant if it finds itself accidentally in a sandbox, or behaving differently when running in a virtual machine environment in an attempt to cover its tracks. What are the strategies?” Robert McCardle, director of Trend Micro’s Forward Looking Threat Research team, said that responding to these new attacks would be a challenge because cyber security and law enforcement agencies were both handicapped to some extent because they have to “move at the speed of the law”. For example, making requests for co-operation with foreign agencies requires specific processes and channels, something cyber criminals are not subject to.