DARPA competition looks to AI to be cybercrooks

DARPA are starting a competition to help automate defence and see how artificial intelligence can combat cyber-threats. The latest DARPA Grand Challenge is looking to artificial intelligence to seek out and destroy vulnerabilities in software. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Cyber Grand Challenge will see seven teams battle it out to see if machine learning can do better in finding and fixing exploits better than humans. The agency said on its competition website that identifying threats and remediating them can take over a year from first detection to the deployment of a solution, by which time critical systems may have already been breached. "This slow reaction cycle has created a permanent offensive advantage," reads the blurb.