Ex-NSA cyber-boss: AI will soon be a great exploit coder

Former NSA cyber-boss Rob Joyce thinks today's artificial intelligence is dangerously close to becoming a top-tier vulnerability exploit developer. "At RSAC last year, I told people: 'Don't worry about the zero-day AI armageddon,' but I am increasingly worried that AI is going to be a good bug finder this year, [and] an …

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

That's nothing

Turn the tables on the AI and force a warp core breach.

[stiine]

Isn't this piece a repeat?

Didn't El Reg already report that Microsoft had used AI to write Windows code?

[amanfromMars 1]

Stealthy Rule for Virtual Reign. For the Second Coming According to AI

Former NSA cyber-boss Rob Joyce thinks today's artificial intelligence is dangerously close to becoming a top-tier vulnerability exploit developer.

Oh please, who doesn't know that novel rubicon was crossed with new fruits and rewards discovered to be enjoyed and exploited in that environment many moons ago.

Methinks the realisation that many more than just security bosses of every ilk are dangerously close to having to admit is that there is nothing they can ever effectively do to prevent such top-tier vulnerability exploit developers progressing and reinforcing the opportunities presented which has them gifted with a faithful following which almightily leads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stealthy Rule for Virtual Reign. For the Second Coming According to AI

Politics, diplomacy, cyber-army. No AI or mind-reading involved.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Stealthy Rule for Virtual Reign. For the Second Coming According to AI

And it is being made increasingly difficult for y'all to not believe it is a fourth wave of modernisation, ever readied and deeply deployed and craftily employed and already causing all manner of epic panics in forces and sources which are akin to and allies of that which and those whom Dominic Cummings identifies in these few paragraphs from his most recent of blog posts .... a Substack offering entitled "People, ideas machines XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change" April 30

The West’s spiritual-philosophical crisis, explored in Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche writing after the 1848 revolutions (see blog on Dostoyevsky), is the deepest cause of the political crisis we see in the crumbling of old ideas, old institutions (domestic and international), old parties and old political regimes.

A fourth wave of modernisation has begun, not driven by traditional philosophers or the universities but mainly by the internet and technology.

Whenever I talk about philosophy my practical allies say, rightly — almost nobody in politics cares about this, they won’t listen, they mostly can’t do simple politics, it’s pointless trying to get them to think about philosophy.

This is true but misses the point. Blogs on philosophy are not for 99.9% of SW1 — they are for the 0.1% and for people outside SW1.

Everybody in politics is pursuing things they were programmed to pursue by dead philosophers. We are all somewhat ‘NPC’. The collapse in standards of elite education means we are less able than many of our ancestors to think for ourselves. The political crisis we’re in requires deep new stories. The old parties’ old stories are deathly stale and is partly why they only mobilise apathy or hate. To develop new stories we need to figure out why the old stories are played out. For this, we must turn to the deepest ideas. The coming discussions over biological engineering and AI demand the same.

I won’t now go into what seems to be coming next.

You might like to ponder on the very real likelihood that what seems most probably, absolutely certain to be coming next are Stealthy Rules for Virtual Reigns for Second Comings According to AI ...... whether you like it or not, for you are never to be enabled and made able to stop such Quantum Communications Leaps for Fundamental and Radical Monumental Progress. I Kid U Not.

Que Sera, Sera. Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stealthy Rule for Virtual Reign. For the Second Coming According to AI

Dominic Cummings, the UK's version of US money laundering conspiracy theorist felon Steve Bannon? Why waste bandwidth with this refuse ... just bury it already.

[amanfromMars 1]

Not so much a Deadhead*, more a waste of space and apparently dead common everywhere

That comment of yours, AC, .......

Dominic Cummings, the UK's version of US money laundering conspiracy theorist felon Steve Bannon? Why waste bandwidth with this refuse ... just bury it already.

..... has you firmly self identifying as an NPC.

Have a well deserved dislike downvote in recognition of your troubles.

* ..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhead

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not so much a Deadhead*, more a waste of space and apparently dead common everywhere

Huh!? Step outside amanfromMars 1, inhale, touch some grass ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stealthy Rule for Virtual Reign. For the Second Coming According to AI

"whether you like it or not, for you are never to be enabled and made able to stop such Quantum Communications Leaps for Fundamental and Radical Monumental Progress. I Kid U Not."

The day you are able to factor large prime numbers, you may win.

I Kid U Not.

[0laf]

I thoguht it already was pretty good at identifying and creating exploits

[Clausewitz4.1]

Endpoint detection

but the computer had endpoint detection products installed.

An skilled attacker would have bypassed it. No need for AI, humans are better at creativity.

[HuBo]

Re: Endpoint detection

Yeah ... I think the issue at play though (overall) is not so much one of quality and proper creativity but rather one of quantity, through automated industrialized mass probing, tampering, and exfiltration, 24/7/365, aided by autocorrelated stochastic recall through lossy databases. Newfangled AI tools make it possible to throw whole bowls of cyberspaghettis at security walls, nonstop, to see what sticks, even if they're not quite as tasty as homemade handcrafted fresh pasta ...

Reminds me also a bit of textile weaving and the replacement of human-operated mechanical looms with the Jacquard -- so efficient it sparked major revolts.

[druck]

Reverse bullshit

AI can also help defenders. Roland said one his human staff engineers reverse engineered a piece of eBPF code – a job that took about half a day. "The AI system took about 30 seconds," Rowland said.

But if you haven't done the manual reverse engineering, how do you know the AI output isn't bullshit?