“In 10-15 years, we will be deep in a ‘war of the machines’ era with advances in artificial intelligence bringing fast and sophisticated execution of security defense and cybercrime.”

Recent cybercrime has seen hackers threaten to dump insurance files related to the 9/11 attacks and briefly led to the shutdown of a Texas town. Security Today reports on the ladder:

City representatives disclosed the cyberattack last week, stating the city was struck by ransomeware [sic] on Thursday, leading to all servers being disabled to prevent further spread. Del Rio’s Management Information Services (MIS) Department then attempted to isolate the malware by turning off Internet connections for other city departments. In turn, this prevented any members of staff from logging into government systems.

In response, the Cyber Education Foundation is launching a national ‘Cyber Culture Summit’ series to speak about the importance of changing the culture around cyber security.

What Are The Cyber Culture Events?

“The inaugural Cyber Culture event will take place in Atlanta on January 22, 2019, at Atlanta Tech Village,” read a press release sent to journalists by the Cyber Education Foundation. Later in the press release, the organization detailed their goals:

Cyber Culture is a community of business executives dedicated to educating corporate America in the benefits of creating a business culture of cybersecurity. The organization’s website, cyberculture.io, serves as a repository of educational information applicable to C-Suite executives, HR professionals, Infosec experts, and marketing executives. Cyber Culture conducts regular events for managers, directors, and executives to learn through experience how a shift in company culture towards cyber security can spare their organizations from years and billions of dollars after a security attack.

Michael Daughtery, Founder and CEO of the now-defunct LabMD is on the Cyber Culture teams after winning an appeal last year against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), was quoted in the memo. “Your organization is going to get attacked. It’s not “if”, but “when”. The only question is, how will your organization handle it? Your organization, not your CISO or security department. I say that because the world has changed and cybersecurity is not one person’s job. Cybersecurity must be the corporate culture.”

Cyber Security Threats

IT portal tracked the largest cybersecurity breaches in 2018, showing the need for increased security by businesses when dealing with private data. “Facebook admitted that around 50 million users were compromised by the security breach. As per Facebook CEO, the company has not seen the accounts getting compromised nor found any inappropriate activity. Later, Zuckerberg confirmed that the attackers used Facebook developer APIs for getting information.”

“Around 2 million T-Mobile customers who were based in the US had their account details breached in which their names, email IDs, account numbers, billing details and encrypted passwords,” their reporting continued.

According to Tech World, “The largest collection of leaked data in history has been posted online by security researcher Troy Hunt, who discovered a dataset comprising more than 772 million email addresses and 21 million passwords in a package of 12,000 files.”

Ondrej Vlcek, CTO and GM of Consumer at Avast gave the following statement about the future of cybersecurity and how companies will battle cybercriminals:

In 10-15 years, we will be deep in a ‘war of the machines’ era with advances in artificial intelligence bringing fast and sophisticated execution of security defense and cybercrime. This will be a battle of AI vs AI. The availability of low cost computing and storage, off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms, AI code and open AI platforms will drive increased AI use by the good guys to defend and protect – but also increase deployment of AI by the bad guys. There will be sophisticated attacks launched on a grand scale, quickly and intelligently with little human intervention, that compromise our digital devices and web infrastructure.