President Obama on the Future of Cybersecurity

WIRED recently conducted an interview with President Barack Obama on the future of cybersecurity. During the interview, he notes that “if you take a public health model, and you think about how we can deal with, you know, the problems of cybersecurity, a lot may end up being really helpful in thinking about the AI threats.”

This is exactly the type of approach we are taking at CyberGreen. Here is an excerpt from the section of the video (embedded below) which starts at 6:33.

OBAMA: Traditionally, when we think about security and protecting ourselves, we think in terms of armor or walls. Increasingly, I find myself looking to medicine and thinking about viruses, antibodies. Part of the reason why cybersecurity continues to be so hard is because the threat is not a bunch of tanks rolling at you but a whole bunch of systems that may be vulnerable to a worm getting in there. It means that we’ve got to think differently about our security, make different investments that may not be as sexy but may actually end up being as important as anything.

What I spend a lot of time worrying about are things like pandemics. You can’t build walls in order to prevent the next airborne lethal flu from landing on our shores. Instead, what we need to be able to do is set up systems to create public health systems in all parts of the world, click triggers that tell us when we see something emerging, and make sure we’ve got quick protocols and systems that allow us to make vaccines a lot smarter. So if you take a public health model, and you think about how we can deal with, you know, the problems of cybersecurity, a lot may end up being really helpful in thinking about the AI threats.

You can view the full WIRED article here.