The End Is Nigh! What Comes Next?

"In bots vs. hackers, AI is close to winning." Thus declares a headline in a recent The Wall Street Journal front-page article (behind paywall). Bonus aggravation: that's the title on the physical paper version of the story, and if you read it online the title is "AI hackers are coming dangerously close to beating humans."

Fear, danger, defeat. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Or, as the crawler to start The Empire Strikes Back, put it: "It is a dark time for the Rebellion."

Ready to give up yet? Have you laid out cookies and milk for our robot overlords?

Let's actually read the story.

Two computer engineers at Stanford university created an AI model, named Artemis, designed to assess cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Then they let the AI model 'attack' Stanford's College of Engineering servers. They found that the servers were vulnerable.

The story continues:

"Stanford's network hadn't been hacked by an AI bot before, but the experiment looked like a valuable way to shore up some security flaws in the Stanford network...'AI gives us a lot of crap and lies, and at the same time it can be used to detect mistakes no one found before'."

What do we learn?

First, cybersecurity exists to deny access to unauthorized users whose efforts seek to exploit information technology systems. That's its whole rationale.

Second, there have always been authorized and unauthorized users. As systems have grown more complex and more central to the functioning of an organization, the nature of access and the surface of the system have expanded -- requiring better cybersecurity.

Third, where are the 'defeat' and 'winning' parts in this story? This is a story about better tools and better-qualified practitioners.

If you really never want to be "defeated" you should upgrade that 17-year-old Linux machine you have running -- and you know who you are -- and go back to DOS. But if you want to win and not be 'defeated' by Artemis, then your increasing skill self-upgrade is a good bet.

Headlines are not cybersecurity. Better tools and better professionals working to create better systems are cybersecurity.

That's where you come in.

Ask us how you can fight back and win against AI fear-mongering.