Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about slowing down the pace of AI development. And yes, there are legitimate moral, ethical, geopolitical, and safety concerns with the use of AI. It’s not clear yet whether an AI slowdown could happen, let alone whether it should (hat tip to Dr. Ian Malcolm). I admit, I’m not really qualified to opine on the impacts unrestricted AI might have on bioterrorism, the balance of international power, or even our chances of being eaten by dinosaurs. What I can tell you, though, is that any sort of “AI slowdown” is not likely to have much of an impact on cybersecurity.
There are a few reasons to think this. The most obvious one is that models are already really good. We’re at the point where the newest models bring only incremental improvements in cybersecurity capabilities. Arguably, they’ve been getting better so fast that our ability to use them effectively for defensive tasks hasn’t kept up. On the offensive side, practically every recent model is already able to mine decades of tech debt to uncover an uncomfortable number of vulnerabilities. Instead of chasing model improvements, our best strategy might be to improve our agentic harnesses and frameworks, essentially giving us better capabilities with our existing models.
Maybe even more importantly, many of us are still not eating our cyber-vegetables. I get it: AI is hot. It’s sexy. It brings the money and the board’s attention. But no matter how great your AI is, if it’s sitting on the typical two-and-a-half-legged stool that is most IT environments, you’re still going to have compromises and breaches no matter how much AI you throw at it. We’ve known for a long time now that good security depends on things like asset and role inventories, identity management, least privilege, and segmented networks. They’re not as shiny as AI, but they’re more impactful in terms of making it harder for threats both human and agentic to successfully carry out attacks. This is not to say that you shouldn’t be looking at AI until you’ve solved all your other security problems; just don’t look only to AI.
Regardless of whether we slow the pace of AI development or not, we still have plenty of places to make significant security improvements using the models we already have access to. By making better use of what we already have and by investing in well-known security fundamentals, we can come out ahead no matter whether AI development accelerates, slows down, or is trapped in a kitchen with a pack of hungry velociraptors.
P.S. I’ve got some speaking engagements coming up soon (see below). If you see me, don’t be shy about asking for a Pyramid of Pain sticker or button!