AI broke the cybersecurity world. What’s next?

Today, I’m talking with Alex Stamos, chief security officer at Cognition and longtime cybersecurity expert, about what a mess cybersecurity is right now. This episode is part one of a special series looking at AI in real life. I’ve always enjoyed talking to Alex because he’s so direct, and you’re going to hear him say that the multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry as we’ve known it is essentially overdue to the unrelenting, AI-boosted waves of hacks, breaches, and attacks — and this is only the beginning of how much AI is changing security. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Both private actors and also state actors, like Russia or North Korea, are breaking into systems all over thanks to AI helping them both detect and exploit vulnerabilities all at the same time. It’s got a real frontier feel to it, Alex notes, just like the ’90s, when the whole idea of an always-online world was brand-new. That much disruption means a lot of places where bad guys can get in while everyone else is left scrambling. Alex isn’t a doomer in the long run, but he does think we’re in for a “dark age” while we try to figure out how on earth to adapt to the new era. There’s a lot going on here — we even got all the way to how AI-powered misinformation and slop might be managed on our social networks. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay: Alex Stamos on how AI is upending cybersecurity. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Alex Stamos, you’re the chief security officer at Cognition. You’re also a lecturer at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center. Welcome back to Decoder. Hey, thanks for having me, man. I’m excited to talk to you. It’s been a long time since you and I chatted in what you might call the “content moderation era” of internet policy discourse. I feel like you and I talked a lot about how all that was working, about election security, all those sorts of things. We’re in a new era of big problems on the internet, particularly around cyber defense, cybersecurity. You’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot. You referred to the past few weeks as “security awareness month.” Tell me what’s going on. Just give me the lay of land right now. October is traditionally security awareness month. Lots of companies run events and deal both internally and then tell people, “Change your password, use multiple passwords, use a password manager.” What has happened over the last month is we’ve had a couple of these big bugs, PHP, Node and such. What’s been less discussed is a huge number of companies have been breached. You have a series of AI-related companies, the neoclouds that have been breached in succession. You have the Binance hack, which is the largest heist of anything in human history. You have the Cursor incident where one of the things that’s going on here is these hacks are being chained together. From what we know right now, one of the companies that was broken into was Fireworks, which is a prominent provider of AI services to a number of companies. From the Fireworks hack, API keys were stolen that allowed people to break into Cursor. Once they got into Cursor, they then pushed a bad plugin, which went to 5,000 more companies and that caused 5,000 potential breaches. It’s just this kind of permanent continuous breach that is going on throughout the tech industry. A CISO friend of mine said to a bunch of us, “Is anybody else tired?” And everybody said yes, because effectively we have been at DEFCON 2 for all of October and now going into November. I’m going to ask you some really dumb questions here. Who is behind all these attacks? Is it Russia? Is it North Korea? Do we know? It’s a variety of different groups. It is not just because adversaries have decided, but what has happened is, from my perspective, we are at the start of the takeoff of adversary capability enabled by AI, that the open-weight models have now gotten to the point at which you can automate most of the kill chain. This “kill chain” term is something we stole from the military. In the military, they mean to actually kill something. They’re the steps you do to blow something up. In cyber, the kill chain is the things you do to have an effect on a target. So to steal information, to turn something off, to steal money, to steal Bitcoin. Traditionally, you do research upfront, you look at a piece of software, you find a vulnerability, you write exploits, and you do that all way ahead of time. And then you have a human being go and take that stuff you built and deploy it against either one target — because maybe you’re a government and you’re going against Lockheed Martin or you’re going against another government or you’re a ransomware actor — and you take all that work you did and you deploy