This last year has given a clearer understanding of the security threat created by AI technology. The attack techniques most leveraging AI include brute force and social engineering attacks. In addition to an increased effectiveness of breaching digital assets these AI enabled techniques have greatly reduced the time to breach. The number one variable to reducing the impact of a breach is time to respond and to contain the breach. With the emergence of AI technology cyber security teams will have significantly less time to respond and contain a breach before the impacts of the breach are realised.

The rise of AI enabled SOCs 

Time to both respond to and to contain a cyber event is critical to minimise the impact of an attack. The challenge for Security Operations Centers is timely accurate determination of a cyber attack. SOCs detect billions of notable events and are challenged with triaging these events to identify cyber events that require a response. These SOCs are not lacking data – they are challenged with fidelity of the information and the ability to quickly and effectively respond – as a use case that was made for SIEMs that are enabled with AI technology.

Quantum computing overtakes AI as the number one cyber security concern 

Many of the fears expressed after the arrival of ChatGPT and the presence of AI in everyday life have not materialised like autonomous systems threatening human engagement and AI’s potential to brute force data encryption. This is not meant to downplay the impact that we’ve seen with the emergence of AI, this is meant to illustrate the significantly greater impact we are going to see from the advent of quantum computing. In 2025 organisations need to at least develop a plan to migrate to encryption that isn’t vulnerable to quantum computing attacks.