Cisco joins the AI wave — to protect against misuse of the technology

By Jon Swartz

Cisco execs caution that OpenAI's ChatGPT will make phishing attempts in particular harder to detect

Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive Chuck Robbins recently almost fell prey to a suspicious link that nearly tricked his discerning eye.

As CEO of one of the largest sellers of security products, Robbins said the sophistication of the malicious link underscores the role that artificial intelligence has had in making it more difficult to spot cyber-attacks.

On Monday, Cisco (CSCO) unveiled an AI-fueled component to its cloud security initiative a year ago. The service is to safeguard against potential security breaches advances in fake video, audio, and text presentations powered by AI when more people are working from home. Company executives caution OpenAI's ChatGPT will make phishing attempts in particular harder to detect.

"Security is the game of minimizing risk, not reducing it to nothing," Robbins said in a roundtable interview with several reporters at the company's San Francisco office Monday afternoon. "Reduce the time it takes to investigate an attack."

At the same time, Robbins said Cisco is contemplating hiring a vice president to head its responsible AI operation, and beefing up at a time while Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL)(GOOGL) Google, and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) are trimming AI ethics teams.

Cisco's product announcement kicked off the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, where AI's promise and threat is a major storyline.

Fears of deceptive content, aided in great part by AI, has corporations and individuals predicting an explosion in AI-related cyber-attacks over the next six months to a year.

Several, including Robbins, point to the firing of the editor-in-chief of Die Aktuelle, a German magazine that published a fake AI interview with former Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher, who has not been seen in public since he suffered a brain injury in a skiing accident in December 2013.

"Imagine the classic Nigerian scam that is targeted to people and not based on one broad misplaced chain letter," says Steve Wilson, chief product officer of Contrast Security. "ChatGPT has made sophisticated AI available to every script kiddie."

Indeed, the threat of AI -- the industry's latest craze -- mirrors those of other breakthrough technologies that burst upon the scene: They are not only adopted by businesses and consumers but by cybercriminals, according to Raju Chekuri, CEO of NeteRich.

"What to me is most concerning is we rush to the technology with the most buzz, but we don't understand the basics," Erkang Zheng, CEO of JupiterOne, said in an interview. "It's like cutting corners when building a house."

This is where vendors like Cisco and others come into play. They see an opportunity to analyst data flows and quickly sift through internet traffic data to identify patterns that could lead to security breaches. "Security is a data game," Jeetu Patel, head of Cisco's security and collaboration units, said in a briefing Monday.

-Jon Swartz

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04-25-23 1334ET

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