Can cybersecurity ever be as safe as tap water?- opinion

Source Domain: www.jpost.com

When I turn on my kitchen tap, I do not think about cholera; I assume the water is clean. This assumption is the product of an invisible system – reservoirs, filtration, chlorination, pressure monitoring, and a regulator that can shut the whole thing down if a sample fails. Safety is engineered upstream so that you get clean water without even thinking about it.r

We have never had anything like that in cybersecurity. The Internet, our mobile networks, and the software and applications we develop and use – were all built on the opposite assumption. Security is something each organization is expected to bolt on afterward, at its own expense, with its own people, hoping its competitors and adversaries are no more diligent than it is.

In this analogy, the water has always come out of the tap unfiltered, and we have been told to boil our own water.

A development at the AI company Anthropic over the past two months suggests, for the first time, that the tap-water model might be within reach for cybersecurity. It also suggests why getting there is genuinely dangerous. Executives need to understand both halves of this sentence.

Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, has dedicated teams to rigorously stress-test their models for potential risks and to design protective safeguards, but these defenses often remain fragile. (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)

What Anthropic did

In April, Anthropic disclosed that it had built a frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, capable of autonomously finding previously unknown software vulnerabilities (zero-days) and writing working exploits for them. This is not an incremental improvement on the vulnerability scanners your security team already uses. The model has reportedly found flaws in every major operating system and web browser, including bugs that were undiscovered for decades.

Anthropic chose not to release Mythos to the public. Its reasoning was blunt. A tool that can find and exploit weaknesses in the world’s major software at scale is…

Source