Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Welcome! Log in to stay connected and make the most of your experience.

Input clean

Our Science Fiction Cyber Future

The cybersecurity industry is currently enamored with concepts of autonomous defense, including elements of machine learning, behavioral analytics, and artificial intelligence—and rightly so. Programed to be able to study all vulnerabilities in the public domain, autonomous bots (autbots)—not to be confused with bots simply conducting repetitive tasks like guessing default passwords as programmed—could take what they learned from previous human efforts and come up with innovative methods to target systems, creatively finding unknown vulnerabilities and crafting patches for them.

As current cybersecurity professional shortages show, new approaches and lots of automation and robotics will be required to address the plethora of current and new cyber threats; autbots could help address issues of a deficient workforce and scale needed to achieve cyber defense objectives. Autbots could be used to augment existing red teams conducting penetration testing, either by handling some of the more labor-intensive aspects of the research and assessment, and delivering their results to humans for exploitation, or engaging in red teaming on their own, as they would be capable of assessing, attacking, and securing a network fully autonomously.

Keep reading...Show less
Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Related Articles

The Golden Dome is Missing a Key Focus

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION – On January 27, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order aimed at defending the U.S. against an attack by [...] More

Getting NATO to Be Able to 'Fight Tonight'

EXPERT Q&A — Last week’s NATO summit in The Hague was largely seen as a success, with all members (except Spain) agreeing to raise the alliance’s [...] More

Report for Tuesday, July 1, 2025

8:18 America/Chicago Tuesday, July 1 [...] More

Covering the Blaze the World Forgot

BOOK REVIEW: Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps TragedyBy Chas Henry / Potomac BooksReviewed by: Bill HarlowThe Reviewer — [...] More

The Math Behind Trump's $1 Trillion Defense Budget

OPINION — “The President's FY ‘26 [Fiscal Year 2026] National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, which is a 13 percent increase from FY '25 [...] More

An Urgent Call to Close the Loopholes on Chips and China

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION -- The core lessons from the Cold War should guide us as we face the new “Axis of Aggressors” today. First among these, [...] More

Report for Monday, June 30, 2025

8:29 America/Chicago Monday, June 30 [...] More

A Good NATO Summit, Though Russia Won a Round

EXPERT Q&A — NATO leaders convened in The Hague this week for a summit aiming to strengthen the alliance's defenses, with the ever encroaching threat [...] More

NATO Wins Will Have an Impact

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT Q&A — NATO leaders convened at The Hague this week and agreed to raise the alliance’s defense spending target to 5% GDP, marking [...] More