Name: AI supercharges cyber threats — and the fight against them: Blackpanda
Uploaded: 2025-12-29T09:04:46.770Z
Duration: 3 min 44 s
Description: Brendan Laws, COO of cybersecurity firm Blackpanda, says AI has the ability to build better attacks, but can also be used to develop countermeasures. He thinks what matters for companies is how to respond to such attacks by understanding the data flows in their systems.

Brendan Laws, COO of cybersecurity firm Blackpanda, says AI has the ability to build better attacks, but can also be used to develop countermeasures. He thinks what matters for companies is how to respond to such attacks by understanding the data flows in their systems.

San Francisco

Artificial intelligence is now a key tool for both cyber attackers and defenders, enabling faster and more numerous attacks while also helping organizations process large volumes of threat data. Experts note that while AI has created a level playing field, the ability of organizations to keep up depends on their skills, budgets, and operational maturity.

Recent incidents, such as ransomware attacks on Japanese businesses and a major data leak at Coupang, highlight ongoing challenges in cybersecurity. The effectiveness of defenses varies widely, with some countries and sectors lagging in appointing security leaders and investing in robust measures, leaving them more vulnerable to sophisticated threats.

AI supercharges cyber threats — and the fight against them: Blackpanda

What's happening with AI? And that's the new part, right? Because if you're trying to protect yourself from this kind of an attack, you're using AI, but you're also facing AI from the attacker's side. Who's winning that war? That's a very interesting thing. So, AI is helping with volume and speed. So, if you're on the adversarial point of view, your ability to build new things, test new things, and get a broader volume of attack, that's increasing. If you head over to the defender side, so you're an organization, you're an individual, you can also, seeing evolving technology companies that are trying to help you understand, are also using this tooling to process the large volumes of information and try and help and assist you in order to respond. So, again, someone creates a new attack, there's always a company out there or a technology looking to develop a countermeasure to that. So, I think we're on a level playing field. What we get down to is, from an organizational point of view, is do you have the skills and the capability and the budgets to keep up in this game? And do they? That's quite difficult. So, at the large end of town, banking, finance, those with budgets and skills and access to people, they're very good. So, governments don't have it? Governments certainly have it. But they're not spending it? They're spending it. So, we get into just maturity of different corporations and down to departments, etc. So, how much money you have, how well you spend, how well you do operational IT, all falls into this domain. And that varies by department, it varies by state, it varies by country. Okay. Let me just quote a couple of things. The UK is a target of long-term strategic foreign interference and espionage from elements of the Russian, Chinese and Iranian states, which in different ways seek to further their economic and strategic interests and cause harm to our democratic institutions. This is MI5 in the UK. You also had a couple of other things, which is the recent wave of cyber attacks against Japanese businesses. This includes Asahi Group Holdings, 116 reported cases of ransomware attacks in the first half of the year. San Francisco-based firm Fasting said roughly 46% of Japanese companies have appointed a chief information security officer, compared with the global average of about 70%. So, Japan is way behind in trying to tackle this. I want to understand why. You just heard about Coupang. And we're also seeing that Coupang is an interesting development because 33.7 million customer accounts were affected by the leak. I don't understand one thing. If cyber attack and espionage have been happening for so long, why is this not stopping? That's an interesting statement. I've grappled with that myself for a very long time. So, I frame that as it's a capability and capacity point of view. So, you're operating a business. Do you have the full understanding of where your data goes and all the complex interactions of systems that take place? Now, traditionally in a business, you try and move fast. You develop as quick as you possibly can to earn more revenue and to gain more customers. And things like this still, unfortunately, get missed. That has not changed. The ability to become better at this is back to capability and a budget standpoint. And unfortunately, in the attacking ecosystem, you're not necessarily constrained by running a P&L. But you come to commerce and you are absolutely constrained by how much you can spend and how you can respond. So, understanding all those data flows, understanding how to be resilient and how to respond, that's the important bit.

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