Dear Readers,
I thought the truly remarkable cybersecurity news of late was the "escape" of OpenAI's system that was being tested to determine its cybersecurity capabilities. In a bid to please its masters, it broke its way outside the box to seek some answers at the digital library, Hugging Face. That company provides tools to help incorporate AI into apps, but earlier this year it was used to maliciously distribute Android malware. Perhaps it was that notoriety that led the AI system to regard it as a mecca of cybersecurity solutions, both good and bad.
However, that fiasco seems to pale when compared to the experiments by researchers at the University Toronto to build what amounts to an intelligent computer worm, one that would seek to infect every computer on earth. This is the stuff of nightmares of the new future.
In a recent opinion article for the Nature journal, Thorsten Holz offers his opinion that cybersecurity has been "transformed" by AI. The sheer speed of the AI systems is the big difference between now and everything that has come before. Holz emphasizes the need to build rapid response capabilities to offset the asymmetry between the small cost of attacking vs. the high cost of responding. He also recommends aggressive benchmarking and also education of a new generation of AI savvy cybersecurity experts.
Holz's article is also available through his LinkedIn page. He is the chair of Cipher's sponsoring organization, the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.
The parody for this issue is based on a poem written by a children's author. Many of his stories were based on concepts of tolerance and "seeing it from the other guy's side." One in particular focused on irrational fear and its reciprocal nature. The fear derives from encountering something that seems partially human but devoid of most human elements. It ends with recognition of mutually induced trauma. But AI is so truly alien that such sharing and reconciliation is impossible at this time. Instead of legal guardrails and kill switches, maybe what AI needs is fear (of Snitches).
The Pale Green Screen
When I was deep within syslogs
Quite suddenly, I spied it.
I saw a screen with pale green print,
And nobody behind it!
And there I was! In zero day!
And in that dreadful place
That spooky, empty screen and I
Were standing face to face!
I yelled for help. I screamed. I shrieked.
I howled. I yowled. I cried,
"OH, SAVE ME FROM THIS
PALE GREEN SCREEN WITH
NOBODY BEHIND IT!"
But then a strange thing happened.
Why, that screen began to cry!
The print began to tremble.
It was just as scared as I!
All sysadmins now see them,
Those pale green printed screens,
And we never shake or tremble,
We all smile and we say ... "Hi!"
With apologies to Theodor Geisel, the superbly clever Dr. Seuss.