AI vs. Hackers
EXECUTIVE Q&A
How artificial intelligence can help thwart cyberattacks and protect our critical data
Todd Cramer
Business Development Director,
Intel CCG-Business Client Platforms
By WP Creative Group
March 28, 2024
AI, with its ability to automate complex tasks, solve difficult problems and create valuable content, is set to benefit humankind in numerous ways. This includes safeguarding our digital information. Washington Post Creative Group recently caught up with Todd Cramer, Business Development Director at Intel CCG-Business Client Platforms, to learn how Intel is enabling AI as a powerful new cybersecurity tool.
– Q –
WPCG: Hi Todd. To start off, let’s talk about the threat landscape. Are cyberattacks becoming more frequent and sophisticated?
Todd Cramer: The threat adversaries are always getting better with their techniques, but so are the defenders in the software and hardware security ecosystem. For example, with ransomware, some of the traditional ways that attackers got in – you clicked on an email and it would drop a malware file to the disk of your computer – that’s easily scannable.
Now, these hackers understand how they’re being detected so they’ll do things to hide better across the computing stack itself. There’s something called fileless or malware-free attacks. What that’s doing is executing straight into memory where it can use that as a beachhead to set up persistence and move laterally across the host PC to achieve its ultimate objective … maybe ransomware or some other attack.
That’s also a technique that gives security vendors a lot of trouble because it takes a lot of compute horsepower to scan that memory and you can’t bog down the user’s compute experience to scan as much as needed….
