Five Eyes issue ‘call to action’ as AI becomes a ‘core’ cybersecurity risk – National

Source Domain: globalnews.ca

Cybersecurity agencies for Canada and its Five Eyes allies have issued a whole-of-society “call to action” that warns artificial intelligence is “rapidly transforming cyber risk,” allowing attackers to exploit vulnerabilities at ever-increasing speed.

At the same time, the joint advisory says AI offers “powerful tools” to strengthen cyber defences and urges organizations to integrate them into their core business strategies.

“While AI will help us improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats,” the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and its counterparts in the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand said.

“The timeline is not years, it is months.”

The advisory says the arrival and rapid advancement of frontier AI models that can find and exploit unknown vulnerabilities faster than humans means cyber risk “can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue.”

Story continues below advertisement

“This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility,” it says. “Boards and executives should ensure cyber resilience is in place and works under pressure.

“It is not enough to have controls,” the advisory continues. “Leaders must be confident those controls will perform during a real incident. This requires reassessing long-standing trade-offs and using AI deliberately to strengthen defence – not just improve efficiency.”

Organizations across all sectors are being urged to take “urgent” action on limiting system access, invest in training and preparedness, accelerate protocols and timelines for security updates and patching vulnerabilities, and enforce strong permissions and authentication for verified users.