Earlier this week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes – that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club – jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the breathless headlines about it, and the advice they gave is pretty much the standard advice everyone gives – albeit with newfound urgency.
Internet risks are nothing new, and cyber-attacks – both large and small – have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models.
What’s been changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability. For most of human history, the two terms were synonymous – but computers have decoupled them. As the gap between the two expands, humans empowered with these AI tools can do more: more writing, more research, more analysis and also more damage than ever before. These models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems. And to the extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense.
In 1998, seven people from the hacker group L0pht testified before Congress. They told a mostly clueless Senate committee that they could take down the internet in 30 minutes. That was partly real and partly bravado, but it illustrates an important point: hacking into systems, stealing data and causing damage all required skill.
Contrast the L0pht hackers with hackers derided as “script kiddies”. They didn’t understand computers, or security. Instead, they used hacker tools written by others. Their actions required minimal skill and even less knowledge. But once those hacking tools became widespread, the number of potential attackers increased.
That number has continued to increase, as quality and availability of prewritten attack tools has grown. And it is growing dramatically with AI. Today’s AI systems – not just the frontier models, but most of them – are capable of carrying out cyber-attacks automatically. They all do better in the hands of skilled attackers, but increasingly they are able to act autonomously with only minimal prompting.
The thing about people with ability but no skill is that they are often outsiders, not part of any professional community, and not bound by any rules or norms. This phenomenon is much more general than in cybersecurity. Any doctor can tell you how to untraceably poison someone, and many virus researchers know how to create a bioweapon. Any bridge engineer can tell you how to place explosives to blow a bridge up. The reason that murderous doctors and terrorist engineers are so rare is that the lengthy process of acquiring those skills also instills a moral and ethical code. If every random person has access to good poisoning advice, that puts us all in danger.
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