McAfee: Keep an eye on the humans pulling the levers, not the AIs

Security firm McAfee has warned that it’s more likely humans will use AI for malicious purposes rather than it going rogue itself.

It’s become a cliché metaphor, but people are still concerned a self-thinking killer AI like SkyNet from the film Terminator will be created.

McAfee CTO Steve Grobman spoke at this year’s RSA conference in San Francisco and warned the wrong humans in control of powerful AIs are his company’s primary concern.

To provide an...

Avast: AI, IoT, and fake apps top 2019 cybersecurity threats

According to Avast’s annual Threat Landscape Report, the biggest cybersecurity threats in 2019 will be AI, IoT, and fake apps.

Those who follow cybersecurity will likely be unsurprised at the list, but Avast goes into the specifics of each threat.

“This year, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Fast forward thirty years and the threat landscape is exponentially more complex, and the available attack surface is growing faster than it has at any...

Microsoft wants AI to predict when a PC is going to be infected

Microsoft wants to harness AI's incredible prediction abilities to detect PC malware attacks before they even happen. The company has sponsored a competition on Kaggle which challenges data scientists to create models which predict if a device is likely to become infected with malware given a current machine state. In a blog post, Microsoft wrote:

“The competition provides academics and researchers with varied backgrounds a fresh opportunity to work on a...

Musk warns ‘it begins’ as Putin claims the AI-leading nation rules the world

Elon Musk has issued a warning as Russian president Vladimir Putin claims the nation which leads in AI “will become the ruler of the world.” Musk, co-chairman of OpenAI, has long warned of dire consequences for mishandling AI development. OpenAI itself is a non-profit research company that aims to champion promoting and developing friendly AI in a way to benefit humanity. As with any major technology advancement, however, there will undoubtedly be those which aim to weaponise it and...

Experts believe AI will be weaponised in the next 12 months – attacks unslowed by dark web shutdowns

The majority of cybersecurity experts believe AI will be weaponised for use in cyberattacks within the next 12 months, and the shutting down of dark web markets will not decrease malware activity. Cylance posted the results of their survey of Black Hat USA 2017 attendees yesterday, and 62 percent of the infosec experts believe cyberattacks will become far more advanced over the course of the next year due to artificial intelligence. Interestingly, 32 percent said there wasn’t a chance...