Our Science Fiction Cyber Future

By Matt Devost

Matt Devost has nearly 20 years of experience working on cybersecurity, counterterrorism, critical infrastructure protection, intelligence, and risk management issues in a variety of government and private sector environments. He is currently the EVP Strategy and Operations as Tulco Holdings. Prior to joining Tulco, Matt was a managing director and led Accenture’s Global Cyber Defense practice. He joined Accenture when they acquired his company FusionX where he was and CEO from 2010-2017. Previously, Devost was President and CEO of the Terrorism Research Center from 1996-2008 and has founded or served in key management positions in companies like Total Intelligence Solutions, iSIGHT Partners, Terrorism Research Center, Technical Defense Associates, Security Design International, and iDEFENSE.

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.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

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

Subscriber+


Related Articles

Search

Close