Cyber defenders need AI tools to fend off a new generation of AI-powered attacks, the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said Wednesday.
“The concept of using AI to combat AI attack or something like that is very real to us. So this, again, is commanders’ business. You need to enable your [chief information security officer] with the tools that he or she needs in order to employ AI to properly handle AI-generated threats,” Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit Wednesday.
Artificial intelligence has reshaped cyber, making it easier for hackers to manipulate data and craft more convincing fraud campaigns, like phishing emails used in ransomware attacks.
Whitworth spoke a day after Sean Cairncross, the White House’s new national cyber director, called for a “whole-of-nation” approach to ward off foreign-based cyberattacks.
“Engagement and increased involvement with the private sector is necessary for our success,” Cairncross said Tuesday at the event. “I’m committed to marshalling a unified, whole-of-nation approach on this, working in lockstep with our allies who share our commitment to democratic values, privacy and liberty…Together, we’ll explore concepts of operation to enable our extremely capable private sector, from exposing malign actions to shifting adversaries’ risk calculus and bolstering resilience.”
The Pentagon has been incorporating AI, from administrative tasks to combat. The NGA has long used it to spot and predict threats; use of its signature Maven platform has doubled since January and quadrupled since March 2024.
But the agency is also using “good old-fashioned automation” to more quickly make the military’s maps.
“This year, we were able to produce 7,500 maps of the area involving Latin America and a little bit of Central America…that would have been 7.5 years of work, and we did it in 7.5 weeks,” Whitworth said. “Sometimes just good old-fashioned automation, better practices of using automation, it helps you achieve some of the speed, the velocity that we’re looking for.”
The military’s top officer also stressed the importance of using advanced tech to monitor and preempt modern threats.
“There’s always risk of unintended escalation, and that’s what’s so important about using advanced tech tools to understand the environment that we’re operating in and to help leaders see and sense the risk that we’re facing. And there’s really no shortage of those risks right now,” said Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has an extensive background in irregular warfare and special operations, which can lean heavily on cutting-edge technologies.
“The fight is now centered in many ways around our ability to harvest all of the available information, put it into an appropriate data set, stack stuff on top of it—APIs and others—and end up with a single pane of glass that allows commanders at every echelon…to see that, those data bits at the time and place that we need to to be able to make smart tactical, operational and strategic decisions that will allow us to win and dominate on the battlefields of the future. And so AI is a big part of that,” Caine said.
The Pentagon recently awarded $200 million in AI contracts while the Army doubled down on its partnership with Palantir with a decade-long contract potentially worth $10 billion. The Pentagon has also curbed development of its primary AI platform, Advana, and slashed staff in its chief data and AI office with plans of a reorganization that promises to “accelerate Department-wide AI transformation” and make the Defense Department “an AI-first enterprise.”
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