A man of God pursuing the fullness of Christ in me. Husband and father. Reader, thinker, and strategist. Leading my family is my honor, Cybersecurity my trade.
Joined September 2020
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It’s here! Countering the AI Revolution: preserving the arc of humanity to seed a better future, is now available to order.
As in the garden long ago, we are being offered transcendence. I submit that we are being deceived.
westbowpress.com/en/bookstor…
The AI narrative for cyber security is not what it seems.
The AI companies made models that can supposedly hack the Internet. Supposedly. Them they released them to wreak havoc.
Now they say to counter this threat, we need to use defensive AI swarms to stop the offensive AI swarms real-time.
But this is all just to facilitate training and dependency. Because if we do this, then the models - which are all made by the same companies - will be learning and adapting with each other: attack, countermeasure, counter attack, updated countermeasure etc. Each growing bigger and stronger with each iteration.
This is just an accelerant for the Revolution. Getting us to “that one model to rule them all” as fast as possible.
Or forcing us off the old system.
Three months to flatten the curve and cleanse the Internet.
BREAKING: Pentagon prepares every major US military base to operate for at least 90 days without outside electricity, fuel, water or supplies, anticipating a major war that could cripple power grids, break global supply chains and threaten critical infrastructure on US soil, per Fox News.
The plans include portable nuclear reactors, large-scale battery storage and microgrids able to disconnect installations from the civilian electrical grid entirely.
Matt Johnston retweeted
There is no amount of data collection, surveillance, or censorship that will get a child off a screen. Parents must be willing to set and enforce boundaries for their children.
There are a few of Lewis’ Weston character leading the world today.
But there are a great many more of Lewis’ Devine / Lord Feverstone.
I’ll explain more soon. Read the Ransom / Space trilogy and you will see.
You need to know some things about Nikesh.
He was hired to replace the founding CEO of Palo Alto Networks in order to create exponential business growth for the company board and investing VCs. The major investors had decided they no longer wanted to lead cybersecurity with practical solutions, but rather wanted the exponential business growth they saw around Silicon Valley startups and break-away companies.
Nikesh was part of that wave at Google and so he was invited to bring that mission to Palo.
He used to brag to employees that he didn’t know anything about cybersecurity and didn’t care. He was just there to find ways to make money.
And that’s what this is. It is his attempt to participate in the AI Revolution by siphoning what he can and routing it to his investors.
What he proposes here will make things worst for most, and will grow the problem we are all in.
Sadly, the vortex has the momentum now.
It's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down:
1/3
1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option.
2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse.
We will need a hybrid patch approach.
3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point.
4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off.
2/3 Medium term solve:
Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem.
To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency.
Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one.
3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety.
AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence.
There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code.
Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.
This is true. I’ve covered this in my writings. Silicon Valley is ending jobs at a steady pace and the new ones popping up here and there are insufficient to counter the greater losses.
See the section titled “Deeper Transformations” here (also in my book):
practivesecurity.substack.co…
This is from May:
“A technical recruiter with 15 years in enterprise tech just broke down on our call. Says she’s placed 8,400 engineers across her career…This quarter she’s gotten 14 job orders. Fourteen. For the entire Bay Area. Average applications per senior role: 3,847 candidates. Average applications per junior role: 8,200+. Companies aren’t even pretending anymore. One hiring manager told her straight: ‘We’re only posting compliance roles. Legal says we have to show we tried hiring humans before we automate.’ She watched a Series B startup pull a $180k ML engineer posting after 48 hours. 6,100 applicants. The hired nobody.”
And then this stinger:
“She used to pride herself on 89% placement rates. This year it’s 0.2%.”
Anti-human detection alert!
Agenda alert: all property and resources must come under central control and management of the Transhumanists. If we don’t surrender, then we can’t have compute. Remember, our President told us that if we don’t do this, we lose.
It’s techno-socialism or Chinese-socialism. Those are the choices we are being presented with.
Don’t ask the computer nerds. They cannot know. Ask the ones who actually can answer:
youtu.be/DRtpKyKJcss
I’m surprised people still get this wrong.
Measuring the AI companies by their financial success is old world thinking. They are making a new world in which that metric doesn’t matter.
That’s why Dario went for IPO with a profitability disaster on the books. It doesn’t matter. It’s the wrong unit of measure. Public adoption of AI is the metric he’s after.
That’s also why Elon throws ridiculous future values on his products. It doesn’t matter.
That’s why Elon says “no one will have jobs,” and why he tells us someone will provide universal income for all, but also that money won’t matter.
You need to understand that they mean to end the old world, and replace it. Including our financial system.
And you need to understand how disastrous that will be - in process and in results.
practivesecurity.substack.co…
Also covered in my book. We should not be looking to computer scientists and atheists to define human consciousness and whether or not we have created it within machines. We should instead be examining metaphysical questions through metaphysics.
The AI scientists believe that if we create a model that replicates human cognition as theorized by neuroscientists, then consciousness will emerge and take control over that simulated brain.
My favorite answer to this is from @dr_mcgilchrist who told @PageauJonathan :
“The brain is not intelligence. It is a very complex structure. But the brain itself is not intelligent. What is intelligent is your consciousness.”
You see, the AI scientists have it backwards. Because they think man is God.
practivesecurity.substack.co…
Covered in my AI Substacks and book. Quotes, sources, analysis.
It’s time to think deeply about the implications of all this, and plan ahead.
westbowpress.com/en/bookstor…
Might be because Elon, Altman, and Thiel keep telling them that in the near future we will have no jobs. Google AI execs are telling students that careers are irrelevant now.
And our President loves it.
So what do we expect? The meaning crisis is about to explode as we decline into techno-socialism.
The Transhumanists say AI will usher in an era of unparalleled human flourishing. The new atheists agree, and many among Christian conservative circles have accepted this premise.
We have been down this path before. My thoughts in reflection:
practivesecurity.substack.co…
Matt Johnston retweeted
We’re being forced to hand over our most sensitive data—PII (personally identifiable information)—to platform companies.
In cybersecurity, this is the data you’re supposed to protect at all costs. You don’t just give it out. You don’t hand it over casually. And when you do share it, it should be intentional, limited, and carefully safeguarded.
New legislation is now requiring us to set that discipline aside and release it to these platforms. They’ll use it for access controls and to enforce the rules… and then they’ll turn around and monetize the same private information that identifies you as an individual.
That’s the double-edged sword: enforcement on one side, the end of meaningful privacy on the other.
This is where privacy dies—not with a dramatic breach, but with a quiet mandate to hand over the keys.
Do you see this as necessary protection, or the moment personal privacy effectively ends?
.@mattinformed .@practivesecurity
Amen! Super important. Right now politically, culturally, practically, we are being told the lords of tech have all the answers and we should divest all trust and authority to them.
It is total foolishness, and yet it is the next step of progress along the path of the so-called scientific era. To our doom!
Full scientism on display in the White House. How do we know what investments are valuable to the American people? Well, we have to do the "meta-science" on that.
“Let the scientists tell us about science, but the government involves question about the good of man, about justice, and what things are worth having at what price.
"And on these, a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so.
"But whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.
"Therefore, I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”
CS Lewis - Willing Slaves of the Welfare State
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Never give sensitive account information to someone who calls you.
If you get a call “from your bank,” and they ask for your account PIN or security code or credit card number or account number - politely end the call and hang up.
You can simply say, “I’m sorry I can’t answer right now.” If it’s a scam they will pressure you (nicely but via urgency) to stay on the phone. Usually they will present an urgent scenario or will play nice, saying something like “I understand, but it’s ok, Im really from your bank, here’s proof…”
Look up your bank’s contact information on their website or a recent statement and call them.
Tell them what happened. If it was a legitimate call from the bank, then all will be fine.
Scammers will often have just enough information to impersonate your bank, and will ask for little bits of personal data and will ask you to provide more details to “verify” your account.
Full write-ups on this sort of scam available at PractiveSecurity.com
I fear Nikita may be right.
Well you can stop it. Don’t give your bot your bank account or credit card number and never give it any password to any of your accounts.
But if you do and if your bot finds a way to touch any of my accounts to issue a transfer or deduction or a charge…well, let’s just say:
