Newsmakers talk ‘Cybersecurity in a New Era of Tech’ in San Francisco

On Wednesday, April 26, Axios chief technology correspondent Ina Fried and cybersecurity reporter Sam Sabin led conversations at an evening event in San Francisco looking at what’s next for cybersecurity policy and tech platform accountability amidst mounting cybersecurity threats. Guests included Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) executive assistant director for cybersecurity Eric Goldstein and Google Cloud chief information security officer Phil Venables. A View from the Top sponsored segment featured At-Bay co-founder and CEO Rotem Iram.

• Eric Goldstein on the cybersecurity risks of AI’s unpredictability: “But if we think about how AI plays games like chess and Go, we know that it plays those games in fundamentally inhuman ways, in ways where the grandmasters in those practices actually can’t conceptualize the moves that the AI makes until the AI wins, and I’ve been thinking through how that model generalizes to AI as a malicious cyber actor, and AI’s ability to identify attack paths that a human attacker that a human red team just wouldn’t think about and what that does to our defensive model.”
• Phil Venables on early indicators of AI malware generation: “There’s been a little bit of early indicators of malware generation, but not a huge amount yet. But all of us are taking it very seriously because we think that is going to happen and we’re all working pretty hard to use the same AI to counter adversarial use. But the one thing I would remind us is when you think about this is, it’s not necessarily going to take an AI to defeat an AI equipped adversary. It’s going to take all of the other basic controls…”
• Rotem Iram on the role of government in today’s risk landscape: “Even though security keeps evolving, technology evolves, there’s AI and whatnot and the attackers are pretty sophisticated, the reality is that the vast majority of security breaches are the same, do the same things. It’s the same basic concepts. It’s failures in security operations…you know, just keeps on happening. And I think that is the place where government needs to probably say, all right, it doesn’t seem like it’s solving itself. I need to step in.”

Thank you to At-Bay for sponsoring this event.