Federal government agencies will need to “greatly accelerate” their efforts to implement key zero trust security measures in order to keep up with potential cybersecurity threats resulting from the ongoing development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, said a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) official who addressed the Red Hat Government Symposium 2023 event in Washington, D.C. today.
“If your agency is inching towards zero trust now, you probably want to look at accelerating that greatly to try to best keep up with the pace at which AI can start influencing,” said Ken Bailey, acting deputy branch chief of cyber defense coordination and threat hunting at CISA.
Bailey explained that with the quickening pace of AI technology development, Federal agencies will have greater opportunities to reap the benefits of the technology, and talked about some of the critical use cases that CISA will be pursuing.
“What my part of CISA does is intelligence-driven threat hunting,” Bailey said. “I think that is a really untapped area for society in general, and how AI can start helping us,” he said.
“Right now [we] have people trolling through this data and hoping to find patterns,” Bailey said, adding that the employment of AI will let his operation “comb through some of this data that we’ve got, and start getting a little bit ahead of the people that are using AI for malicious purposes and help identify these [threat] patterns.”
During the same discussion, Gretchen Stewart, chief data scientist, public sector at Intel, discussed the never-ending struggle that agencies and the private sector face with needing to implement zero trust strategies in an AI evolving world.
“I think that many times we think of it as okay, we’ve done the AI and we can move on, right? But … you’ve got to continue to do this and artificial intelligence and leveraging things like ChatGPT or large language models,” said Stewart.
“I think it’s one of those things you really are never done,” said Stewart.
