Page 58 - BusinessWest December 8, 2025

BusinessWest. “They said, ‘hey, you’re doing some cool and inter-
esting things with cybersecurity, we’re doing cool and interesting
things with cybersecurity, so let’s hang out.’”
Shapiro’s address — and ‘fireside chat’ discussion with O’Brien
— touched numerous times on the role of AI in cybersecurity, and
why it’s not all bad news.
“The first thing is to recognize that every tool can be used for
good or for bad. A gun can be used either to defend yourself and
your family in your home or to hold up a convenience store. And
encryption — we love encryption when it protects our private com-
munication; we hate it when it’s called ransomware,” said Shapiro,
who is also the author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark His-
tory of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks.
He applied the same message to AI, after a quick history lesson
explaining the difference between classical AI and generative AI,
which is a much more recent phenomenon.
“AI has been part of cybersecurity for such a long time. You had
very basic symbolic systems that helped detect for intrusions and
exploitations. In the 2010s, you could not walk through a trade
show without people telling you about their AI that protects every-
one, and that was machine learning that tried to correlate usage
with time, with location, and try to figure out the markers of a
threat.
“Now, when people talk about AI being a threat, what they really
mean is generative AI being a threat, large language models being a
threat. And just like AI had been used for defensive good purposes
before, we can still take generative AI and use it for good purposes
as well.”
The bad purposes are plenty, Shapiro said, from deepfakes to
malware. But in many ways, AI is simply sharpening the sort of
threats that already existed.
On the traditional internet, O’Brien told BusinessWest, “we had
things called botnets. These are automated computers that are
being controlled by a command and control computer somewhere.
So your grandmother’s TV set or set-top box or router can be con-
trolled by some adversary somewhere on the other side of the
world. You get enough of these machines talking together, they can
attack websites; they can break stuff down. Those kinds of threats
have been going on for a very long time.
“I would say what’s going on right now is AI is an accelerating
force,” he went on. “We still have these threats; everything old is
new again. But because AI is able to sort of think on its feet, it’s
able to probabilistically change direction and try certain things very
easily.”
During the Cybersecurity Summit, O’Brien talked about a bot-
net called Aisuru that was the most highly trafficked domain in the
world during November — more than Google, Yahoo, Facebook, you
name it — because of the ease with which it insinuated itself into
everything from routers to cameras to gaming platforms. Its goal?
Distributed denial of service attacks trying to take down websites.
That sort of threat takes cybersecurity out of the business realm
and makes it everyone’s concern.
“Now that everybody’s online constantly, we have devices in our
pockets which are basically supercomputers. We’re surrounded by
devices, cameras, thermostats, all the stuff that’s connected to the
internet. Cybersecurity is now a central topic. It’s encompassed so
many aspects of our life,” he explained. “Chat GPT was released
to the public a few years ago, and there is a real revolution in com-
puting, and people are starting to see how these algorithms can do
incredibly useful stuff, but also incredibly dangerous stuff.”
But AI can also be a strong weapon against those dangers.
“I remember old-style viruses. We had some Macs in our elemen-
tary school that got a virus, and everything went down. But then we
started having virus detection engines — they look for signatures,
and they react. AI is very good at this sort of signature detection
and being very agile, being able to look at some things and say, ‘this
looks like activity that shouldn’t be happening in the network.’
“So those detection tools, this ability to read through long logs
of text, which is what people use ChatGPT and these types of tech-
nologies for anyway, are security tools that are speeding up the pace
of action and analysis and giv-
ing cybersecurity analysts a lot
more detailed information a lot
more quickly.”
“The students are
coming to us with
scenarios that are
interesting, their
own ideas about
unique hacks
that could be
happening.”
Threats
Continued on page 62 >>
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