Posted on 10/17/2024 1:22:31 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The annual cost of cybercrime is expected to reach $10 trillion dollars next year. To put that figure into context, in terms of GDP it would be the third biggest economy in the world after the US and China.
That’s why countries from Australia to China, the UK and US are racing to tighten up their cybersecurity laws – and why the UN is expected to pass a landmark cyber treaty in the next few weeks.
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From deep-fakes and disinformation to hacks and attacks on infrastructure, healthcare and security networks, cybercrime is becoming the number one challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. And artificial intelligence is already changing the rules of the game.
Our increasingly connected digital world makes us all more vulnerable to criminal gangs and state-sponsored hackers who can access our data and devices. Imagine handing over control of your bank account, your electric vehicle, even your pacemaker.
So how is the international community responding? To gain insights into the scale and nature of the problem, Al Arabiya News’ Riz Khan met leading experts at the Global Cybersecurity Forum in the Saudi capital Riyadh. Chris Inglis was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead cyber operations in the US and has become known as America’s first Cyber Tsar:
“I would say that cyber defense can never be perfect. It’s never possible. It’s not possible to have a perfectly secure architecture, something that’s impervious to all threats, you know, for all time that literally defends itself. So at best, we can make it defensible,” he said.
Interpol is the world’s largest police force. Formed in the aftermath of the First World War it was established to combat an increasing threat from international crime. Collaboration between countries allowed crime-fighting to extend beyond national boundaries. Today the organization has almost 200 member countries and when it comes to fighting cybercrime, that original principle of collaboration is more important than ever. As Interpol’s Director of Cybercrime, Dr. Neal Jetton, leads the agency’s battle against the hackers.
“I mean, you can almost just get rid of the word ‘cyber’ and just call it ‘crime’ because there’s not a lot of crime that’s really not connected now to a computer, to a phone or some other network system,” he told Al Arabiya News.
Jetton considers the development of AI to be a double-edged sword, benefitting both criminals and law enforcement alike.
“With A.I., I think quantum computing and encryption is going to become problematic in the future, I think those are things that I’m sure criminals are already salivating at the thought of. I think that there are, though, law enforcement and other government agencies that are also looking at that and saying, ‘we’re going to be ready for this.’”
Dr Richard Staynings is a cyber security strategist for Cylera, which considers cyber threats to healthcare systems. He told Al Arabiya News that healthcare produces more data than all other sectors combined. That makes it attractive to hackers targeting medical records, digital devices such as pacemakers and even bringing down entire networks.
“It’s a very real threat. Unfortunately, most of our medical devices that are in use - whether they’re embedded like a pacemaker or an infusion pump for insulin, for example, or an x ray or CT or ultrasound system, for example, - these are all systems that were designed for medical or clinical functionality. They weren’t designed with security in mind.”
Humans are often regarded as the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity. That’s where Dr. Mary Aiken comes in. As a forensic cyber-psychologist, she inspired the hit crime drama CSI: Cyber. In fact her character is played by the Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Patrica Arquette. Aiken’s work includes profiling hackers and identifying their vulnerabilities. And she’s ready to back her own brain against AI any day!
“Oh I can beat AI any day, hands down. I mean, I’ve got a million-year-old piece of technology, a piece of technology that’s been in development for a million years: the human brain. On any given day that is going to beat A.I. We mistake it as human intelligence because it can do some things incredibly quickly. That’s not intelligence. That’s just a task,” she said.
Aiken also suggests we should focus less on A.I. – and more on I.A.
“I think what we have to do is look at not A.I. replacing humans, but IA – intelligence augmentation – that symbiotic relationship between man and machine, placing the human at the center of the decision-making process.”
Even the smartest humans can be vulnerable to cyber-security attacks. It seemed both worrying yet strangely reassuring that the former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told Riz Khan that he has also been hacked numerous times.
“I had my identity stolen. Someone has filed my taxes as recently as this year and given the publicly available information! None of us is inured or safe from this. We’re all in the same kind of bucket,” he said.
There’s a lesson for us all. If America’s first Cyber Tsar can get hacked, we need to be taking cybersecurity seriously. If you’re hearing about cybersecurity for the first time you might not know that the US has declared October to be Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Even more surprising is the fact that it first did so 20 years ago! The battle continues.
You can watch full coverage in the latest episode of the Riz Khan show on Al Arabiya News from Wednesday October 16th.
“10 Trillion”…. per year? Highly unlikely!!
AI infrastructure - faster pipelines and storage - is the gain. While the “generative” writing is poor quality, especially when attempting to explain accounting-and-math.
“AI infrastructure - faster pipelines and storage - is the gain. While the “generative” writing is poor quality, especially when attempting to explain accounting-and-math.”
Just to experiment, AI edits the above as:
The benefit lies in AI infrastructure — accelerated pipelines and enhanced storage. However, the quality of “generative” writing is often lacking, particularly when it tries to explain accounting and math concepts.
"particularly when it tries to explain accounting and math concepts"
. . . is totally off the mark. I meant what I wrote: "accounting-and-math".
For example, "AI" is a poor writer of financial info and cannot be trusted at all when filing reports, monthly, quarterly, and annual statements. Not even in a small financial news blurb, where "AI" cannot figure the "accounting-and-math" correctly.
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