Essays Tagged "CSO"
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Manipulating the Meeting Notetaker: The Rise of AI Summarization Optimization
As AI increasingly becomes the system of record for company meetings, adversarial techniques for manipulating the algorithm’s takeaways and actions items will sway business decisions and directions in subtle ways.
These days, the most important meeting attendee isn’t a person: It’s the AI notetaker.
This system assigns action items and determines the importance of what is said. If it becomes necessary to revisit the facts of the meeting, its summary is treated as impartial evidence.
But clever meeting attendees can manipulate this system’s record by speaking more to what the underlying AI weights for summarization and importance than to their colleagues. As a result, you can expect some meeting attendees to use language more likely to be captured in summaries, timing their interventions strategically, repeating key points, and employing formulaic phrasing that AI models are more likely to pick up on. Welcome to the world of AI summarization optimization (AISO)…
Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity
AI agents are automating key parts of the attack chain, threatening to tip the scales completely in favor of cyber attackers unless new models of AI-assisted cyberdefense arise.
AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything.
Over the summer, hackers proved the concept, industry institutionalized it, and criminals operationalized it. In June, AI company XBOW took the top spot on HackerOne’s US leaderboard after submitting over 1,000 new vulnerabilities in just a few months. In August, the seven teams competing in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge …
Security ROI: Fact or Fiction?
Bruce Schneier says ROI is a big deal in business, but it's a misnomer in security. Make sure your financial calculations are based on good data and sound methodologies.
Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable.
It’s become a big deal in IT security, too. Many corporate customers are demanding ROI models to demonstrate that a particular security investment pays off. And in response, vendors are providing ROI models that demonstrate how their particular security solution provides the best return on investment.
It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s mostly bunk in practice.
Before I get into the details, there’s one point I have to make. “ROI” as used in a security context is inaccurate. Security is not an investment that provides a return, like a new factory or a financial instrument. It’s an expense that, hopefully, pays for itself in cost savings. Security is about loss prevention, not about earnings. The term just doesn’t make sense in this context…
Schneier: Full Disclosure of Security Vulnerabilities a 'Damned Good Idea'
Full disclosure—the practice of making the details of security vulnerabilities public—is a damned good idea. Public scrutiny is the only reliable way to improve security, while secrecy only makes us less secure.
Unfortunately, secrecy sounds like a good idea. Keeping software vulnerabilities secret, the argument goes, keeps them out of the hands of the hackers (See The Vulnerability Disclosure Game: Are We More Secure?). The problem, according to this position, is less the vulnerability itself and more the information about the vulnerability…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.