We have made it – almost – through another year without being churned into paste by a super-intelligent AI, conscripted into a Martian work camp by an insane billionaire or forced offline by a Carrington event. Even in the absence of civilisation-altering events it's been a busy year. But the advantage of a slow week (I hope that isn't tempting fate) is that you can reflect on the past 12 months and realise that, sometimes, there's only a few stories that really matter. The Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident. "We believe this was a criminal ransomware attack, and not the specific targeting of the Guardian as a media organisation," said Guardian Media Group's chief executive, Anna Bateson and the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.

Cyber-attacks are rarely out of the headlines. We know state actors, terrorists, and criminals can leverage cyber-means to target the digital infrastructures of our societies. We have also learned that, insofar as our societies grow dependent on digital technologies, they become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. There is no shortage of examples, ranging from the 2007 attacks against Estonia digital services and 2008 cyber-attack against a nuclear power plant in Georgia to WannaCry and NotPetya, two ransomware attacks that encrypted data and demanded ransom payments, and the ransomware cyber-attack on the US Colonial Pipeline, a US oil pipeline system that provides fuel to South-eastern States. My work focuses mostly on state vs state cyber-attacks.

Our biggest undeclared war right now doesn't involve nuclear programs or any of the other technologies that usually take up headlines when it comes to this topic. In fact, our biggest war right now takes place on a completely different battlefield-Cyberspace. Cyberspace operations can be used to achieve strategic information warfare goals; an offensive cyberattack, for example, may be used to create psychological effects in a target population. There is a war on in cyberspace. Cyberspace is entirely human-made and has been designed, created, maintained, owned, and operated both by public and private stakeholders across nations. It is continually changing in response to technology transformation.

… DevSecOps (Development Security Operations) and AI/Machine Learning. … cyber intelligence to reduce the effectiveness of enemy operations.

Like many other science fiction writers in the 1940s and 1950s, Asimov was greatly influenced by ideas from hard science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein about what future societies might look like. Heinlein's "Future History" series described a set of laws that were supposed to guide the behavior of citizen-soldiers in his future society. In Asimov's books, he explained that the Three Laws that were incorporated into virtually all robots within the fictional universe, so much so that breaking the law was viewed as an unthinkable violation of one's programming. In many cases, a robot found guilty of having broken the Laws would be dismantled for disposal. In essence, these three principles allow for a reliable set of guidelines for robots but do not prevent them from having significant impact on society -- which is what Asimov intended all along.

The Industrial/Military Complex is saturated with Technocrats who have algorithmic solutions for everything, including warfare. WWIII will be fought with AI-driven asymmetric tactics at the speed of light and far beyond human ability to understand what it is doing. The Joint Operations Center inside Fort Meade in Maryland is a cathedral to cyber warfare. Part of a 380,000-square-foot, $520 million complex opened in 2018, the office is the nerve center for both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency as they do cyber battle. Clusters of civilians and military troops work behind dozens of computer monitors beneath a bank of small chiclet windows dousing the room in light.Three 20-foot-tall screens are mounted on a wall below the windows.

The Joint Operations Center inside Fort Meade in Maryland is a cathedral to cyber warfare. Part of a 380,000-square-foot, $520 million complex opened in 2018, the office is the nerve center for both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency as they do cyber battle. Clusters of civilians and military troops work behind dozens of computer monitors beneath a bank of small chiclet windows dousing the room in light. Three 20-foot-tall screens are mounted on a wall below the windows. On most days, two of them are spitting out a constant feed from a secretive program known as "Project IKE." The room looks no different than a standard government auditorium, but IKE represents a radical leap forward. If the Joint Operations Center is the physical embodiment of a new era in cyber warfare -- the art of using computer code to attack and defend targets ranging from tanks to email servers -- IKE is the brains. It tracks every keystroke made by the 200 fighters working on computers below the big screens and churns out predictions about the possibility of success on individual cyber missions. It can automatically run strings of programs and adjusts constantly as it absorbs information. IKE is a far cry from the prior decade of cyber operations, a period of manual combat that involved the most mundane of tools.

The Joint Operations Center inside Fort Meade in Maryland is a cathedral to cyber warfare. Part of a 380,000-square-foot, $520 million complex opened in 2018, the office is the nerve center for both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency as they do cyber battle. Clusters of civilians and military troops work behind dozens of computer monitors beneath a bank of small chiclet windows dousing the room in light. Three 20-foot-tall screens are mounted on a wall below the windows. On most days, two of them are spitting out a constant feed from a secretive program known as "Project IKE." Join the Watchdog newsletter to hear about our latest ground-breaking investigation. The room looks no different than a standard government auditorium, but IKE represents a radical leap forward. If the Joint Operations Center is the physical embodiment of a new era in cyber warfare -- the art of using computer code to attack and defend targets ranging from tanks to email servers -- IKE is the brains. It tracks every keystroke made by the 200 fighters working on computers below the big screens and churns out predictions about the possibility of success on individual cyber missions. It can automatically run strings of programs and adjusts constantly as it absorbs information. IKE is a far cry from the prior decade of cyber operations, a period of manual combat that involved the most mundane of tools.

Even the best inventions and intentions can result in unintended consequences. Email vastly improved many forms of communication and information sharing -- but it also begat spam, phishing, and an entire industry in cybersecurity. Social media connected billions of people and spread democratic ideals -- but it also wrought hacked accounts, stolen data, "fake news," and election meddling. The same is true with today's "advanced technologies" that promise to revolutionize information gathering, data analytics, workplace mobility, and much more during the coming decade. The ethical considerations and possible regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics, and other advanced technologies are playing catch-up once again.

One area where AI and machine learning can be applied is in the ongoing fight against cybercrime. AI provides a significant advantage over traditional systems, which rely on static rules to identify patterns and flag suspicious activities. AI, on the other hand, is always learning--using intelligent algorithms to detect and identify new attack patterns and incorporating that knowledge to flag cyberattacks more quickly and with much higher accuracy. While AI is making media headlines almost daily, adoption of AI technology it is still in its nascent stages; a recent study by Accenture and Ponemon noted that in the financial services industry, just over a quarter of firms have deployed AI-based security solutions. But there's a defensive case to be made for AI investment, too.