A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.IT TAKES ONLY a brief chat with the organisers of Black Hat Asia to realise this is no ordinary conference. Whereas most professional get-togethers invite their guests to piggyback on the hotel Wi-Fi, Black Hat builds the network for its annual conferences in Las Vegas, London and Singapore from scratch, installing switches, access points, firewalls and monitoring sensors before the conference opens.

The Network Operations Centre (NOC) must then defend it in real time from thousands of the world’s best hackers—not just the conference’s adversaries, but also those attending, who are explicitly tasked with attacking its infrastructure.This year’s Singapore edition, held from April 21st to 24th, took place in the shadow of announcements from large tech companies that artificial-intelligence models could now outperform all but the best hackers. Anthropic’s Mythos, for example, the most prominent such model, is already said to have identified severe vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser”.

For most tech users, this feels like a watershed moment. For those at Black Hat, however, it is confirmation of what they have long seen coming.Defending Black Hat is “orders of magnitude” harder than ordinary corporate cyber-security, says Neil “Grifter” Wyler who has run the NOC for 24 years, all but 6 of which have been alongside his colleague Bart Stump.

Indeed, when the head of cyber-security for the Paris Olympics needed a model for his own security-operations centre, he spent a week with the NOC at Black Hat London. Part of the challenge is scale: a typical firm faces one or two attackers at a time whereas Black Hat must deal with thousands, many testing exploits freshly