Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks with Emily Chan at the APEC CEO Summit held at Moscone West in San Francisco, California on November 16, 2023. The APEC Summit is being held in San Francisco until November 17th.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
“It’s natural to be concerned about the impact on cybersecurity. But counterintuitively, I think AI will actually strengthen our defenses against cybersecurity,” Pichai told attendees at the Munich Security Conference last weekend. told.
Cybersecurity attacks are growing in volume and sophistication, and are increasingly being used by malicious actors to exert power and extort money.
According to cyber research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, cyberattacks will cost the global economy an estimated $8 trillion in 2023. This amount is expected to increase to $10.5 trillion by 2025.
A January report by the UK’s National Cyber Security Center, part of the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, says AI will only increase these threats, lowering the barrier to entry for cyber hackers and allowing more malicious attacks such as ransomware attacks. It is said that cyber activities will become possible.
“AI is disproportionately helping those on the defensive because it has the tools to impact at scale.
Sundar Pichai
CEO of Google
But Pichai said AI is also reducing the time defenders need to detect and respond to attacks. This will alleviate the so-called defender’s dilemma, where cyber hackers only need to successfully break into a system once, while defenders must succeed every time to protect it, he said. Ta.
“AI is disproportionately helping the people we’re defending because we’re getting tools that can influence it at scale against the people we’re trying to attack,” he said.
“So in a sense we’re ahead of the competition,” he added.
Last week, Google announced a new initiative to provide AI tools and infrastructure investments aimed at strengthening online security. The free, open-source tool, called Magika, aims to help users detect malware (malicious software), the company said in a statement, while the white paper suggests countermeasures and research, and aims to help users detect malware (malicious software). He said he is building guardrails around the area.
Pichai said these tools are already used in the company’s products and internal systems, such as Google Chrome and Gmail.
“AI is at a critical crossroads, with an opportunity for policymakers, security experts, and civil society to finally tip the balance of cybersecurity away from attackers and toward cyber defenders.
The announcement comes after major MSC companies signed an agreement to take “reasonable precautions” to prevent AI tools from being used to disrupt democratic voting in the 2024 bumper election year and beyond. was held at the same time.
The new agreement is signed by Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), and includes the following: It includes a framework for how companies should respond to “deepfakes”. .
This occurs as the Internet becomes an increasingly important sphere of influence for both individuals and state-sponsored malicious actors.
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday described cyberspace as “the new battlefield.”
“The technological arms race has been raised to the next level by generative AI,” she said in Munich.
“If you can run a little bit faster than your opponent, you’ll do better. That’s what AI gives us defensively.”
mark hughes
DXC President of Security
A report released by Microsoft last week found that state-sponsored hackers from Russia, China, and Iran are using the company’s OpenAI Large-Scale Language Models (LLM) to step up their efforts to deceive their targets.
Russia’s military intelligence, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and the Chinese and North Korean governments are all said to rely on the tool.
Mark Hughes, president of security at IT services and consulting firm DXC, told CNBC that hacking tools called WormGPT, inspired by ChatGPT, are increasingly being used to perform tasks such as reverse engineering code. He said he was dependent on it.
But he said the company would also benefit “significantly” from similar tools that help engineers quickly detect and prepare for attacks.
“This allows us to speed things up,” Hughes said last week. “Most of the time in cyber, the time you have is the time the attacker has an advantage against you, which is common in any conflict situation.
“If you can run a little bit faster than your opponent, you’re going to do better. That’s what the AI is really giving us defensively at the moment,” he added. .
