MEANINGFUL MOMENTUM OR RUNNING IN PLACE?
Strides in Our Cybersecurity Readiness
From connected cars to AI in health care, the pace of progress is dizzying. But cybersecurity threats are evolving in lockstep. Maintaining momentum has never been so important.
Smart Cities: Less Stress, More Suspect Data
Challenge: Smart cities revolutionize urban living, streamlining government services, easing congestion and ensuring rapid responses to outages and maintenance. The extensive sensor data that smart cities rely on also poses security and privacy concerns.
SOLUTION: Encrypted communications, secure hardware and secure coding practices are core to the protection of smart cities.
Francesca Boem
IEEE Senior Member
“With the diffusion of internet-connected devices, attackers can use them as vulnerable points of access to critical infrastructure systems. As critical infrastructures become interconnected, there is an increasing risk that failures could cause tremendous economic, societal and environmental costs.”
Healthcare Advances, AI Monitoring Needed
Challenge: AI is increasingly used for medical diagnoses, treatment recommendations and drug discovery. Compromised models could lead to misdiagnosis, incorrect treatment plans and even life-threatening decisions.
SOLUTION: Companies need robust procedures to guarantee the provenance of data. They should also have a detailed profile of what “normal” looks like, and how systems are behaving.
Gabrielle Silva
IEEE Member
“AI systems present unique vulnerabilities that make them distinct targets for cyberattacks compared to traditional systems. One vulnerability is their reliance on data for training. They can be compromised through techniques like data poisoning, where malicious data is intentionally fed into the training set to skew the model's output or behavior.”
Remote Jobs More Accessible, DeepFakes Too
Challenge: Deepfakes continue to get better, and they’re being deployed in a number of scams. In some cases, threat actors used deepfakes to secure jobs as remote workers and gain access to sensitive company information.
SOLUTION: Automated technology has improved. But experts recommend other tactics, like additional verification to prove a caller is who they say they are.
Vaibhav Tupe
IEEE Senior Member
“AI helps companies work faster and smarter, but it can also be a new way for hackers to break in, steal data or cause problems. Hackers are now using AI to send better fake emails, impersonate the voice and appearance of executives in videos and break into systems automatically.”
Agentic AI: Financial Power, New Attack Risks
Challenge: Autonomous AI agents can be used to continuously monitor a company’s defenses and identify weaknesses — automatically and with little human oversight. When banks are the target that might mean finding ways to steal data or money.
SOLUTION: Establish behavioral profiles of agentic AI to create baselines for system monitoring. These profiles can play an important role in detecting aberrations, providing early warning signals for potential security concerns.
Qingqing Wu
IEEE Senior Member
“AI agents are increasingly pivotal in cybersecurity. They enhance defense by automating tasks like threat detection, vulnerability assessment and incident response. However, the same advancements are being exploited by malicious actors. Organized hacking groups are reportedly developing AI-powered tools to automate and scale their attacks.”
