How AI is changing the role of cybersecurity – and of cybersecurity experts

In The Terminator, the Skynet artificial intelligence was turned on to track down hacking a military computer network. Turns out the hacker was Skynet itself. Is there a lesson there? Could AI turn against us, especially as it relates to the security domain?

That was one of the points I made while moderating a discussion of cybersecurity and AI back in October 2017. Here’s the start of a blog post written by my friend Tami Casey about the panel:

Mention artificial intelligence (AI) and security and a lot of people think of Skynet from The Terminator movies. Sure enough, at a recent Bay Area Cyber Security Meetup group panel on AI and machine learning, it was moderator Alan Zeichick – technology analyst, journalist and speaker – who first brought it up. But that wasn’t the only lively discussion during the panel, which focused on AI and cybersecurity.

I found two areas of discussion particularly interesting, which drew varying opinions from the panelists. One, around the topic of AI eliminating jobs and thoughts on how AI may change a security practitioner’s job, and two, about the possibility that AI could be misused or perhaps used by malicious actors with unintended negative consequences.

It was a great panel. I enjoyed working with the Meetup folks, and the participants: Allison Miller (Google), Ali Mesdaq (Proofpoint), Terry Ray (Imperva), Randy Dean (Launchpad.ai & Fellowship.ai).

You can read the rest of Tami’s blog here, and also watch a video of the panel.