For all my non-tech people hearing about AI hacking stuff. Here’s a primer on what’s happening and how to contextualize it. Tl;dr it’s a nothing burger for non-techs as we transition to a more stable/secure cyber security architecture. First off, cyber security professionals I’ve spoken to this week are completely unphased by this wave of issues. Nothing is new or unexpected, AI attacks look indistinguishable from mass based attacks by PRC and other similar APT teams. Oh TLS isn’t secure? Oh there are issues with a certificate authority? Hardware/software backdoors put in by IC have leaked and require a cleanup? Shocker. Non-techs were worried about AI slop code creating bugs that would leave us in a permanent state of compromise. The opposite is true. It’s the unpatched human slop code that’s the issue. There is no reinsurance market for cybersecurity so no one has ever taken it seriously at an institutional level. “Cybersecurity” always been about legal compliance rather than actual security. AI is changing that because it’s helping speed up defense by 10-100x. To date the relationship between offense and defense has been so assymmetric that there was no defense. It was common to hear “wait which side of the firewall are we on?” And similar comments. You also know this because everyone’s data is constantly hacked and released and nothing happens. The OPM database with all the US Military/Intelligence Community classification interviews was leaked years ago and nothing happened publicly. That was the norm, not the exception. Anyway, now we have an acceleration of cybersecurity defensive capabilities. We’re even seeing a reinsurance market begin to form. Which means we might actually get to parity (1:1) in attack/defense capability in a couple of quarters. This came at an interesting time from a media perspective because the signal fires had gone off to over-emphasize AI and cybersecurity as a kind of October Surprise, but the trump admin by making the issue about liability kneecapp’d that issue weeks ago. So it’s hilarious to see the usual suspects continuing to beat that drum as we see “zero-days” come out due to AI capabilities proliferate. Anyway the right move is to let the pony-tail corner people do their thing and take no action legally/policy wise. Don’t let anyone mislead you, we do not need any additional government anything related to cybersecurity because of AI. In fact the entire thing is getting more secure than ever, faster than anyone could possibly imagine 12 months ago.