Will AI Usher In a New Wave of Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities?

Businesses and IT leaders concerned about cybersecurity have a lot of potential threats to deal with, from spear phishing attacks to ransomware, and may soon have another item on their worry list: artificial intelligence. Although AI has the potential to boost productivity and handle rote office tasks, freeing employees to work on more complex assignments, there is a looming downside in the security realm. Someday in the near future, hackers may be able to use AI tools to find new vulnerabilities and then create new exploits and attacks in a fraction of the time it would take a human. In August, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department's research arm, sponsored the Cyber Grand Challenge hacking competition in Las Vegas. The contest pitted seven autonomous machines against each other to find and exploit bugs in each other's systems.