Latest News

Major worldwide sporting events like the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup attract global interest as people follow their national teams and hope for success. To put this into context, the Olympic Games are one of the most widely covered sporting events in the world, with an audience of more than 4 billion viewers. Probably owing to the sheer scale of such events, not to mention their high profile, they also attract bad actors looking to disrupt them for ideological reasons or illegal profit.

Critical national infrastructure (CNI) sites and providers are targeted by some of the most advanced and persistent threat actors in the world. The nature of CNI – which encompasses everything from communications and transportation industries to energy networks and water utilities – makes it the ideal high-profile target for ideologically motivated threat actors. Successful attacks demonstrate adversary infiltration and digital superiority. To compound the challenge, CNI has become increasingly vulnerable due to ongoing digital transformation efforts. While these are essential to provide the level of service expected by today’s citizens, growing digital dependence unavoidably introduces a plethora of new risks and interdependencies between disparate systems and services that can be cumbersome to identify and manage.

There has been a lot of talk about AI recently debating its opportunities and potential risks. Today AI can be trained on images and videos of real customers or executives, to produce audio and video clips impersonating them. These have the potential to fool security systems, and according to a report by identity verification platform Sumsub, the number of “deepfake” incidents in the financial technology sector alone increased by 700% in 2023, year on year.

This issue suddenly hit much closer to home for me when Pikesville High School, my alma mater, recently made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It seems that the school’s athletic director allegedly used AI to create and publish a fake recording of the principal’s voice making, let’s just say, inappropriate comments. This prompted immediate public outrage against the principal before these allegations came forward. However, the principal’s reputation is stained regardless of the outcome. This situation serves as a salutary warning that as a society we need to get a handle on AI before such instances become a daily occurrence.

With automated, detailed, contextualized threat intelligence, organizations can better anticipate malicious activity and utilize intelligence to speed detection around proven attacks.

With automated, detailed, contextualized threat intelligence, organizations can better anticipate malicious activity and utilize intelligence to speed detection around proven attacks.

As cybersecurity professionals, we talk a lot about risk. In a world where only the most naïve would suggest that we can prevent all cyber-attacks, we must make sure we understand which cyber threats have the highest risk of becoming reality, and allocate our security resources accordingly. Indeed, this is a key use case for threat intelligence platforms, which help companies identify and understand threats in the context of their business. In our hyper-connected technology environment, if everyone does this effectively, cybersecurity standards will rise, and collective risk will be reduced.