“We’re now going to see agentic cyber defenses deployed against agentic cyber attacks,” said Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, founder of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
"We’ve had tremendous experience. But the scope, scale, sophistication of the threat has changed," US Cyber Command chief Gen. Paul Nakasone said.
Modeling and simulation get an AI upgrade for more realistic training and improved autonomous platforms.
"We must build a robust understanding of AI vulnerabilities, foreign intelligence threats to these AI systems and ways to counter the threat in order to have AI security," Gen. Paul Nakasone said. "We must also ensure that malicious foreign actors can't steal America’s innovative AI capabilities to do so.”
The nomination comes as Gen. Paul Nakasone plans to step down after leading both agencies for five years.
"Strategic competition is alive and well in cyberspace, and we're doing it every day with persistent engagement," the CYBERCOM and NSA leader said.
"We aim to convey that, 'Hello, we are from the government, and we're here to help' is not a scary idea," the general joked, alluding to a famous quote by former President Reagan.
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
"Academics will sit back and say, 'Well, if you just did that and that and that, you would have avoided it.' But if there's no way to impose risk or consequences for [threat actors] doing it, your day is coming," Mandia said.
"We just needed a much smaller dataset, half hour of training time, and all of a sudden, GPT was now a New York Times writer," said Andrew Lohn, senior research fellow at CSET.
"We're not in Kansas anymore," Gen. Nakasone said about the cyber threat landscape and the US's adversaries.
"The Department of Defense officially recognizes five domains of warfare," Rep. Langevin said. "For four of those domains, the senior civilian is a service secretary. Cyber has a deputy assistant secretary, which is four rungs lower than the other warfighting domains. Why does this make sense?"
Explore how networked warfare, AI, and 3D-printed drones are reshaping US Indo-Pacific strategy.
"That was a list of about as many awful things in 10 minutes as I may have heard in recent time," Sen. Mark Warner said of the DNI's threat assessment. Top of mind: China, cyber, and emerging tech.
"We should understand what our adversaries are doing," Gen. Nakasone told Congress. "They are no longer launching attacks from different parts in the world. They understand that they can come into the US, use our infrastructure, and there's a blind spot for us not being able to see them."
As the government investigation continues, security firm FireEye published details of newly discovered backdoor, SUNSHUTTLE, which has "possible connection" to the SolarWinds hack.
“We're going to know our adversaries better than they know themselves,” boasted Gen. Paul Nakasone. Would Sun Tzu be proud or worried?