Are machines the key to keep us safe in an increasingly virtual world?
On bugs, Mayhem and how we’re increasingly immersed in a software based reality.
Like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world”.
It is indeed true that software permeates our lives, from medical devices to IOT, to national security tools and weapons, so it only comes natural to think how cybersecurity is increasingly more relevant as we’re becoming more exposed to cyber-attacks than ever before.
It’s within this landscape that machine-learning is aimed at creating a technology to make “internet” safer automatically.
At the end of May, Facebook announced the release of new Messenger’s features that alert users about suspicious messages, displaying in-app warnings with suggestions on how to proceed, depending on the level of threat.
This new security feature that is now becoming available to iOS systems, uses machine learning analysis of communications by using metadata instead of content to identify shady activity. This tool will allow Facebook to safekeep end-to-end encryption once it will become available for all Messenger conversations by default.
Details on how the detection mechanisms work have not been disclosed however, it is clear that the system working on metadata alone, becomes increasingly able to identify activity patterns over time.
Another example of machine learning applied to content monitoring is Mayhem built for scrutinizing software by ForAllSecure, a startup spun out of Carnegie Mellon University, called and it was kicked-off at the 2016 Darpa Cyber Grand Challenge, a hacking contest hosted in Las Vegas Paris Hotel ballroom.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wanted to boost the development of automated bug hunters and spent about $55 million to set up this contest: from designing and building the event’s network of supercomputers and software the contestants competed to hack to creating a system to be able to look inside this vast network.
On stage, each of the seven computer servers hosted a bot that tried to find and exploit bugs in the other servers, while also finding and patching its own flaws in a game of offense and defense.
Ever since later last year, Mayhem is a standard part of Cloudflare security tools. Last month, the Pentagon awarded ForAllSecure a $45 million contract to widen use of Mayhem across the US military.
Cybersecurity is an additional area which has been put under significant stress by the global Covid-19 pandemic as companies, institutions and Governments with staff working from home found themselves relying on commercial services such as WhatsApp or home wi-fi.
As previously discussed, the pandemic fast-forwarded the way people socialize and interact with internet-based technologies however, when it comes to Government agencies, national security, corporate communication and overall high-sensitivity environments, the inadequacy of tools and security architecture becomes a major vulnerability for cyberattacks such as ransomware, phishing, and scams of all sorts.
The inability to develop custom security systems tailored to the new situation together with the added pressure to keep businesses going and the overall general “distraction” about bigger matters, definitely become a gateway to new exposures and risks.
