Alex Dhillon, founder of cybersecurity startup Outtake AI, discusses why defending against human-targeted social engineering is more critical than focusing purely on machine exploits.
Opinion
Dhillon: AI broke CAPTCHAs and passed the Turing test without enough panic
“One of my biggest anxieties is that, like, generally, to your point, CAPTCHAs are broken, right? Which, like, hey, we passed the Turing test a while ago. For some reason, we just blew past that and don't talk about it enough. We all are blowing past what effec…”
Insight
Dhillon: Generative AI reduced the cost of malicious online behavior to zero
“The cost to be a shitty person online went to kind of zero dollars over the last, like, three years. You got infinite text, infinite images.”
Insight
Dhillon: LLMs allow grandmothers to become cyber scammers
“It's not only that grandmothers are the ones being scammed, it's actually grandmothers can become scammers now, and it's because, right, because it's like, it's just easier than ever and that's actually the real issue. It's like, sometimes people talk about la…”
Insight
Alex Dhillon: Malicious AI outbound volume mirrors legitimate AI sales growth one-for-one
“Just as the volume of AI outbound has increased on like legitimate use cases where I'm sure you and I both deal with a ton of LinkedIn inbound or email inbound. It's basically been one for one on sort of the darker side of it as well.”
Insight
Dhillon: Cybersecurity Firms Historically Hesitate to Hunt Threats Outside Corporate Perimeters
“Historically, cybersecurity companies have been kind of, I think gun shy of stepping outside their perimeter and saying, hey, no, I'm going to go search for threats. Out in the world, like arbitrary websites, social media, wherever it is, and we're going to go…”
Opinion
Dhillon: External threat detection has historically been a graveyard of services firms
“Candidly, this whole space is full of a graveyard of companies that were services companies, right? So, like, it intrinsically was a task so difficult that only humans can do it.”