Hackers are on the brink of launching a wave of AI attacks

They were there to compete in a global-hacking event: the DARPA-sponsored Cyber Grand Challenge designed for machines that can hack other machines. The winner would take home $2 million (£1.5m). The battle was waged over dozens of rounds, with each machine striving to find the most software vulnerabilities, exploit them and patch them before the other machines could use the same tactics to take it out of the game. Each machine was a cluster of processing power, software-analysis algorithms and exploitation tools purposely created by the human teams. This was the ultimate (and, so far, the only) all-machine hacking competition.