Organized crime is very active throughout both the private and public sectors. From banks to major retailers, federal governments to small businesses, fraudsters aren't discerning when choosing which type of organization to target. What's more, crime rings are actively recruiting and deploying groups of thieves across the U.S., making it increasingly difficult for companies to catch bad actors before they strike. Overwhelmed by unmanageable amounts of data, companies have left gaps in their IT systems that criminals are eager to exploit. It's well past time for businesses and governments to take steps to thwart nefarious actors by using technology that outpaces them, keeps customer data safe, and protects organizations across the board.

Artificial intelligence is one of several hot technologies that have the potential to transform the face of combat in the next years. The Joint Artificial intelligence Center was established by the Department of Defense to win the artificial intelligence war. AI might enable autonomous systems to execute missions, achieve sensor fusion, automate activities, and make better, faster judgments than people, according to some visions. AI is quickly developing, and those objectives may be met shortly. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence will influence the more routine, boring, and monotonous duties that military personnel undertake in uncontested situations.

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.

The dawn of truly artificial intelligences will provoke an international security crisis, according to F-Secure chief research officer and security industry heavyweight, Mikko Hypponen. Speaking to Computer Weekly in October 2019 during an event at the company's Helsinki headquarters, Hypponen said that although true AI is a long way off – in cyber security it is largely restricted to machine learning for threat modelling to assist human analysts – the potential danger is real, and should be considered today. "I believe the most likely war for superhuman intelligence to be generated will be through human brain simulators, which is really hard to do – it's going to take 20 to 30 years to get there," said Hypponen. "But if something like that, or some other mechanism of generating superhuman levels of intelligence, becomes a reality, it will absolutely become a catalyst for an international crisis. It will increase the likelihood of conflict."

Earlier this year, concerns over the development of autonomous military systems -- essentially AI-driven machinery capable of making battlefield decisions, including the selection of targets -- were once again the center of attention at a United Nations meeting in Geneva. "Where is the line going to be drawn between human and machine decision-making?" Paul Scharre, director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., told Time magazine. "Are we going to be willing to delegate lethal authority to the machine?" "Malicious computer programs that could be described as'intelligent autonomous agents' are what steal people's data."

Not a day goes by without some fascinating new advance in deep learning, yet most of the conversation around deep learning in the cybersecurity realm has focused on its defensive capabilities, using AI algorithms to hunt through network and server logs to ferret out anomalous activity. This raises the fascinating question of what deep learning might be capable of as an offensive weapon of cyberwarfare. In the leadup to the US presidential election, the US Government proudly proclaimed that it had deployed its cyber warriors to burrow deep inside of Russian infrastructure systems in preparation for possible retaliatory strikes: "U.S. military hackers … penetrated Russia's electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin's command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary." Such widespread infiltration likely took immense resources and preparation from a massive team of cyber experts. What if an organization like the NSA could instead simply fire up a deep learning algorithm, point it at the Kremlin and let the tool take it from there?