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Asked by anon-377268 on 10 Jan 2024.
Question: If AI were programmed to be able to take down network infastructure, how hard would it be for them to recover from this event?
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Andrew Maynard answered on 10 Jan 2024:
What a dark question! First off, the various infrastructures that modern society is built on are perhaps some of our most vulnerable points, and so any possibility of AI being used to take down any sort of infrastructure is pretty serious. And given what humans can already do with techniques like distributed denial of service attacks, I suspect that people will use AI to develop even more disruptive approaches to taking down infrastructure — including network infrastructure.
If they succeeded, it depends on the nature of the attack how easy it would be to recover — and AI will also potentially play a part here. But the worst case scenario does not look good.
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Gareth Hartwell answered on 11 Jan 2024:
Actually I dont think this question is specifically about AI because a computer could be programmed to do this without AI. Network resilience through redundancy, threat detection, virus protection and firewalls etc. is a very important field which is part of cyber security. It is possible to recover from attacks through effective backup and business continuity strategies but it is much better to prevent the attacks from working in the first place.
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 28 Jan 2024:
You would hope that those responsible for whatever network infrastructure you’re thinking of have put redundancies in place to recover from such attacks. However, as we’ve seen in the real world, numerous hacks and viruses have successfully brought large networks and systems to a grinding halt, without even employing an AI-based approach. This feels more to me like making sure “your house in is order” and having those backups and fail-safes ready to go if such an event occurs. This isn’t just down to IT employees, as they will need the resources (money and time) to make sure such resilience is deployed. That means their managers must have the common sense and foresight to recognise the importance of these issues, and here lies one of the major weaknesses of many a business.
I guess you might also be hinting at if there might be AI-based solutions to counter the “AI virus” that caused the damage in the first place. This kind of strategy is used in a number of fields, by using existing AI techniques and methods to train new AI tools to counteract the original model’s capabilities. Building a pipeline like that is extremely interesting and can be very challenging!
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