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After more than 30 years the cybersecurity field, Keith Jones recently realized that his role had changed, from being a single contributor to manager of a fairly large team. And this team was getting a lot accomplished — tasks that used to take up a huge chunk of his workday.
No, his company hadn't hired a group of new employees to work under him. He simply accelerated his use of artificial intelligence tools. Now, instead of grinding through a lot of basic tasks, that work is done for him while he focuses on bigger-picture work.
"It really feels like I have a team behind the scenes, but what I have is Claude [Anthropic's AI tool]," says Jones, who currently works as a cybersecurity researcher. "I've been thinking for the last several months about how much differently I work now than I did a year ago, when I would sit and write all the low-level stuff before I could get to the 10% of the good stuff I really wanted to focus on. Now I can sit back and say, ‘Give me three different ways to solve this problem.'"
width="1024" height="678" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"Keith Jones, cybersecurity researcher
Keith Jones
Most people working in the technology field, like Jones, have had to figure out how best to work with AI. The technology has come on strong, with many companies making its use mandatory and actively evaluati
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 Apple last month filed a new legal complaint with the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) over the British government's demand for access to encrypted iCloud backups belonging to UK users, according to an order issued by the court and reported by the Financial Times.
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Apple has had to introduce a quota on security researcher reports because its systems are being overwhelmed by low-quality warnings generated by AI.
It's a classic illustration of the rule of unintended consequences: a technology meant to help us has become a barrier to getting things done. After all, not only has AI driven the cost of consumer electronics higher, but it is also being used to identify and exploit security vulnerabilities — while also overwhelming security teams with low-grade reports, thus eroding their attention span.
The cost of good intentions
This is what's happened at Apple, as security researchers use AI as a tool to identify new bugs. Perhaps the reports are well-intended. Hopefully, the researchers aren't just motivated by the promise of easy bug bounties. Or maybe this is a cynical attempt to overwhelm platform security teams with low-grade bug reports — while holding back larger attacks for actual use by well-resourced state-backed actors.
We can't know whether attackers really are trying to overwhelm active platform defenses before going in for the kill. But given that it's an actively used military strategy, it's pretty hard to ignore the possibility.
Apple's response
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