It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won’t necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence — a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity — could one day become the go-to hacking tool.
Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities.
Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws. But what if that power was used for malicious purposes? The future of cyberdefense might also pave the way for a new era of hacking.
