Conversely, 41% said they planned to deploy AI-driven threat detection, anomaly detection and behavioral analytics to mitigate AI-enabled threats. These results indicate that organizations are realizing quickly that the only way to fight the threats posed by AI is with AI.
The power that AI delivers for both offensive and defensive cybersecurity should be a top concern for IT professionals, says Buck Bell, director of CDW’s Global Security Strategy Office. In fact, research has shown that not only can frontier AI models — the latest versions — discover vulnerabilities, but they are also capable, based on their goal-seeking bias and reasoning ability, of exploiting complex kill chains to gain access to high-value assets.
“We should be concerned about the increasing ability of AI as a technology to discover and exploit weaknesses,” Bell says. “It’s incumbent now on security practitioners to leverage similar tools to find those weaknesses before the bad guys find them. But we also need to be able to measure risk more broadly. Given how powerful these frontier AI models have become, assessment and prioritization are essential.”
