White House launches AI-based contest to secure government systems from hacks

The White House on Wednesday stated it had launched a multimillion-dollar cyber contest to spur use of synthetic intelligence (AI) to search out and repair safety flaws in US authorities infrastructure, within the face of rising use of the expertise by hackers for malicious functions.

“Cybersecurity is a race between offense and defense,” stated Anne Neuberger, the US authorities’s deputy nationwide safety advisor for cyber and rising expertise.

“We know malicious actors are already using AI to accelerate identifying vulnerabilities or build malicious software,” she added in a press release to Reuters.

Numerous US organizations, from healthcare teams to manufacturing corporations and authorities establishments, have been hacking targets in recent times, and officers have warned of future threats, particularly from international adversaries.

Neuberger’s feedback about AI echo these Canada’s cybersecurity chief Samy Khoury made final month. He stated his company had seen AI getting used for every little thing from creating phishing emails and writing malicious laptop code to spreading disinformation.

The two-year contest consists of round $20 million in rewards and will probably be led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the US authorities physique answerable for creating applied sciences for nationwide safety – the White House stated.

Alphabet’s Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI – the US expertise corporations on the forefront of the AI revolution – will make their techniques out there for the problem, the federal government stated. The contest alerts official makes an attempt to deal with an rising risk that specialists are nonetheless making an attempt to completely grasp. In the previous 12 months, US corporations have launched a spread of generative AI instruments corresponding to ChatGPT that enable customers to create convincing movies, pictures, texts, and laptop code. Chinese firms have launched related fashions to catch up.

Experts say such instruments might make it far simpler to, as an example, conduct mass hacking campaigns or create faux profiles on social media to unfold false data and propaganda.

“Our goal with the DARPA AI challenge is to catalyze a larger community of cyber defenders who use the participating AI models to race faster – using generative AI to bolster our cyber defenses,” Neuberger stated.

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a US group of specialists making an attempt to enhance open supply software program safety, will probably be answerable for making certain the “winning software code is put to use right away,” the US authorities stated.

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