“The part that surprises a lot of people is that attacks themselves didn't change. We didn't wake up with Frontier AI and just say, wow, we now have all of these new vectors that we've never seen before. It's that the techniques that an AI-driven attacker are the same ones that we have known for years and for decades in some cases. But what has changed is the economics. For the entire history of the cybersecurity industry, the expensive part of the attack was sort of the thinking, right? … Now, Frontier AI has deleted that cost. The thinking is now it's instant, it's tireless, it's exhaustive when you're talking about these agentic models. It can check every door, not just the open, obvious ones. … The villain is still the attacker. They just now have the same capabilities that we do, and they're operating under a new economics. So the entry is cheap and enumeration is free.”
sputnikintelligence.com
Jon Krohn asks what has changed about how attacks unfold now that frontier AI models can chain security vulnerabilities together on their own. Amy Blackshaw, who works in identity security, answers that the techniques are old but the cost of planning an attack has collapsed. She also says the blame still lies with the attacker, not the models.
…human, a machine, an AI agent, with that right level of privilege controls. And we're very excited to be part of the Palo Alto Networks organization because we are being infused with resources, innovation, scale, speed to bring more technology to our customers to help them secure their identities.
…people are looking to know how to spell that, it's I-D-I-R-A, Ida. So let's talk about why identity security is now so much more important in this agentic AI. Era. So, what has changed about how attacks unfold now that Frontier AI models can chain security vulnerabilities together all on their own?
Yeah, I think the part that surprises a lot of people is that attacks themselves didn't change. We didn't wake up with Frontier AI and just say, wow, we now have all of these new vectors that we've never seen before. It's that the techniques that an AI-driven attacker are the same ones that we have known for years and for decades in some cases. But what has changed is the economics. So, for the entire history of the cybersecurity industry, the expensive part of the attack was sort of the thinking, right? How does one get in? How does a skilled human have to sort of understand their target environment, work out how to look at one vulnerability in one system, and like you said, sort of chain them to understand how a foothold could be turned into something catastrophic for the target organization. Sometimes that took weeks. It took experts. There was an expense in that attack. Now, Frontier AI has deleted that cost. The thinking is now it's instant, it's tireless, it's exhaustive when you're talking about these agentic models. It can check every door, not just the open, obvious ones. And it's happy to do that for a small company or a large company. And I think I want to take a quick second to be very specific about something. It's about who the villain is, because the villain isn't the models that are enabling this tireless approach of attack vector chaining. The villain is still the attacker. They just now have the same capabilities that we do, and they're operating under a new economics. So the entry is cheap and enumeration is free.
Yeah, there's all kinds of wonderful positive things about abundant, very inexpensive intelligence. And you can imagine, you know, in education, in food security, in healthcare, there's all kinds of positive things, but that same intelligence can be used by bad actors.
Exactly right.
So speaking of which, something that we did an episode focused on this, but you're a security expert. And so I'd love to hear from your perspective, what happened in July with OpenAI's agents getting into the hugging face systems? What did the agent do? And how did it reach cluster admin authority…