The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents based on deep reinforcement learning. Such agents are typically trained in a cyber gym environment, also known as a cyber simulator, at least 32 of which have already been built. Most, if not all cyber gyms provide dense "scaffolded" reward functions which combine many penalties or incentives for a range of (un)desirable states and costly actions. Whilst dense rewards help alleviate the challenge of exploring complex environments, yielding seemingly effective strategies from relatively few environment steps; they are also known to bias the solutions an agent can find, potentially towards suboptimal solutions. This is especially a problem in complex cyber environments where policy weaknesses may not be noticed until exploited by an adversary. In this work we set out to evaluate whether sparse reward functions might enable training more effective cyber defence agents. Towards this goal we first break down several evaluation limitations in existing work by proposing a ground truth evaluation score that goes beyond the standard RL paradigm used to train and evaluate agents. By adapting a well-established cyber gym to accommodate our methodology and ground truth score, we propose and evaluate two sparse reward mechanisms and compare them with a typical dense reward. Our evaluation considers a range of network sizes, from 2 to 50 nodes, and both reactive and proactive defensive actions. Our results show that sparse rewards, particularly positive reinforcement for an uncompromised network state, enable the training of more effective cyber defence agents. Furthermore, we show that sparse rewards provide more stable training than dense rewards, and that both effectiveness and training stability are robust to a variety of cyber environment considerations.

The credit rating agency Moody's has warned that water companies face an "elevated" risk from cyber attackers targeting drinking water, as suppliers wait on permission from the industry regulator to ramp up spending on digital security. Moody's said, in a report to investors, that hackers are increasingly zeroing in on infrastructure companies, including water and wastewater treatment companies, and the use of AI (artificial intelligence) could accelerate this trend. Last month, Southern Water, which supplies 4.6 million customers in the south of England, said the Black Basta ransomware group had claimed to have accessed its systems, posting a "limited amount" of data on the dark web. Separately, South Staffordshire Water apologised in 2022 after hackers stole customers' personal data. Moody's warned that the growing use of data-logging equipment to monitor water consumption, and the use of digital smart meters, made companies more vulnerable to attacks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is truly a revolutionary feat of computer science, set to become a core component of all modern software over the coming years and decades. This presents a threat but also an opportunity. AI will be deployed to augment both defensive and offensive cyber operations. Additionally, new means of cyber attack will be invented to take advantage of the particular weaknesses of AI technology. Finally, the importance of data will be amplified by AI's appetite for large amounts of training data, redefining how we must think about data protection. Prudent governance at the global level will be essential to ensure that this era-defining technology will bring about broadly shared safety and prosperity.

The relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and defence is a longstanding one. The first "AI winter" of the 1970s, when interest in the subject evaporated and research work all but ceased, was due to Anglosphere government and defence bodies pulling the plug on funding. It's still widely believed that telephone conversations intercepted by Five Eyes intelligance agencies under the secret Echelon initiative are scanned in bulk for keywords of interest, allowing conversations of significance to be picked out from among millions of innocuous ones: but in fact, the problem of speech recognition, one of the main applications foreseen for AI, has yet to be completely solved even today. Back in the '70s a lack of tangible results led to an exhaustion of goodwill towards AI. It's common knowledge that military and intelligence interest can propel new technologies forward, and for a long while AI was without that safety net. But the story couldn't be more different today.

Australia on Friday shrugged off Chinese anger over its decision to acquire US nuclear-powered submarines, while vowing to defend the rule of law in airspace and waters where Beijing has staked hotly contested claims. US President Joe Biden announced the new Australia-US-Britain defence alliance on Wednesday, extending US nuclear submarine technology to Australia as well as cyber defence, applied artificial intelligence and undersea capabilities. Beijing described the new alliance as an "extremely irresponsible" threat to regional stability, questioning Australia's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and warning the Western allies that they risked "shooting themselves in the foot". China has its own "very substantive programme of nuclear submarine building", Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison argued Friday in an interview with radio station 2GB. "They have every right to take decisions in their national interests for their defence arrangements and of course so does Australia and all other countries," he said.

Australia on Friday shrugged off Chinese anger over its decision to acquire US nuclear-powered submarines and vowed to defend the rule of law in airspace and waters where Beijing has staked multiple hotly contested claims. US President Joe Biden announced the new Australia-US-Britain defence alliance on Wednesday, extending US nuclear submarine technology to Australia as well as cyber defence, applied artificial intelligence and undersea capabilities. China's government described the alliance as an "extremely irresponsible" threat to regional stability, questioning Australia's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and warning the Western allies that they risked "shooting themselves in the foot". China has its own "very substantive programme of nuclear submarine building", Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday in an interview with radio station 2GB. "They have every right to take decisions in their national interests for their defence arrangements and of course so does Australia and all other countries," he said.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made the world transform and evolved in more ways than we can count. AI has always been feared by people, but now at the cusp of technological advancements, we have understood the many gifts it has brought us. AI Technologies will see the light in the dark and help in the toughest times. It has been around for decades, still, some spaces need major developments whereas some areas have proved useful beyond our wildest dreams. Biometrics It is a statistical measurement of a person's unique physical and behavioural features. It has proved to be one of the AI's advanced futuristic technology that is being used for security and identification purposes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Once thought to be a technology that would struggle to find its place in the real world, it is now all around us. It can influence the ads we see, the purchases we make and the television we watch. It's also fast becoming firmly embedded in our working lives -- particularly in the world of cyber security. The Capgemini Research Institute recently found that one in five organisations used AI cyber security pre-2019, with almost two-thirds planning to implement it by 2020.

Currently leading healthcare security strategy at Cylera, a biomedical HIoT security startup, Richard Staynings has more than two decades of experience in both cybersecurity leadership and client consulting in healthcare. Last year, he served on the Committee of Inquiry into the SingHealth breach in Singapore as an expert witness. He recently spoke to Healthcare IT News on some of the current developments in healthcare cybersecurity. Q. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare are all the rage now, and so are cybersecurity threats, given the frequency and intensity of healthcare-related incidents. In particular, some of the cyberattacks have become more sophisticated through the use of AI to get past cyber defenses.

Attacks are getting more complex. This is especially true when it comes to cyberwar, so much so that government sponsored attacks have been bolstered by research investments that approach military proportions. Just look at the recent report published by the US State Department, which said that strategies for stopping cyber attacks need to be fundamentally reconsidered in light of complex cyber threats posed by rival states. In order to detect and stop these attacks, innovation is required. I say that because anomaly detection based on traditional correlation rules often results in too many false positives and events that can reasonably be manually reviewed.