Bunkering Down

It is hard not to see the parallels between web security and immune systems. Fresh attack vectors lead to new antibodies. There is a continuous ebb and flow between attack systems and defensive responses. From the Morris Worm to emailed .exe viruses to botnets and now AI swarm attacks.

The game keeps advancing and the systems continue to harden, but the risks are also increasing as the tech becomes more and more embedded into our daily lives. The European fridges getting turned off was a warning.

We are firmly in the "ebb" cycle now. Technology is so deeply embedded in our lives that it is just a matter of time before a large scale loss of human life occurs from a targetted attack (or worse, a Huggingface-style "oopsie").

I am not a doomsdayer and I think things will balance out eventually, but how that balancing occurs is another concern - maybe the only solution is to meter and regulate AI access to the web through some "policing" architecture. This could become a privacy nightmare, but it is clear to me that AI needs to have guardrails around it, not inside it.