- NCSC’s Richard Horne says hacking AI tools like Mythos Preview can strengthen defenses if safeguards are in place
- Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, part of the Glasswing project, discovers zero days at scale
- Horne says cutting-edge AI quickly reveals weaknesses in fundamentals, giving defenders a chance to decisively outpace cybercriminals
With proper safeguards and security policies, hacking AI tools like Mythos Preview can have a positive impact on cybersecurity defenses around the world, says Richard Horne, director of the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).
According to the BBC, Horne echoed these statements in a speech to the NCSC’s annual conference, CyberUK, on Wednesday.
“As we have seen in the media in recent days, cutting-edge AI is rapidly enabling the discovery and exploitation of existing vulnerabilities at scale, illustrating how quickly it will reveal fundamental areas of cybersecurity that still need to be addressed,” he said.
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This time it’s different
Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a new security initiative called Project Glasswing, and at its heart, the latest AI model, Mythos Preview. This model was apparently so effective at discovering and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities that Anthropic decided to farm it out to only a handful of large software companies. This way, these companies can get a head start on bad actors, before the model is released to the general public at a later (as yet undetermined) date.
There’s also a lot of discussion online about this being just a publicity stunt, with some people claiming that OpenAI did the same for GPT-2, which later turned out to be much more benign.
However, this time things might be different. The Mozilla Foundation said that with the help of Mythos it managed to find 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150, the latest version of the popular browser. When he tried a similar thing with a previous model – Opus 4.6 versus Firefox 148 – he found “only” 22 bugs.
Announcing the results, Mozilla CTO Bobby Holley couldn’t hide his excitement, suggesting that the cat-and-mouse fight against cybercriminals may finally be over.
“Our work is not done, but we have turned a corner and can see a much better future than simply keeping up,” he wrote. “The defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively. »
Via BBC
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