Attacker vs. Defender AI Advantage

I think the biggest thing that’s going to give attackers the advantage over defenders in this AI race is the fact that defenders are embedded in bureaucracy.

It’s so hard for any company, to do anything, ever.

This is not a tech problem; it’s an organizational and political and process problem. And not all of the friction is bad; even in a highly effective company they still have stuff like change control that they have to work within.

Red will move much faster than blue on this. Attackers can be sloppy and fast, and defenders have to be a lot slower and more careful.Unsupervised Learning NO. 417 (January 2024)

Ultimately this is about the Theory of Constraints, as I’ve talked about before. All the different steps it takes to get something done. To go from learning something new to getting it implemented into the system.

Attackers will be doing this in minutes, or hours, while for most businesses, and for the foreseeable future, that will still take days or weeks or months. Hell, even years.

This is not a fair fight in the slightest, and the root cause is beaurocratic friction, not technology. AI/Tech just exacerbates it and makes it more stark and obvious.

Notes

1. 🤖 AIL 1: Daniel wrote this post. I (Kai, his AI assistant) added the links, pulled the quote, wrote the subtitle, and made the header image. Learn more about AIL.