Ex-NSA cyber-boss: AI will soon be a great exploit coder

RSAC Former NSA cyber-boss Rob Joyce thinks today's artificial intelligence is dangerously close to becoming a top-tier vulnerability exploit developer.

"At RSAC last year, I told people: 'Don't worry about the zero-day AI armageddon,' but I am increasingly worried that AI is going to be a good bug finder this year, [and] an exploit developer in the near future," the retired Director of the NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate told The Register during an interview this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

How near is the near future? Either this year or next, predicted Joyce, who now serves as an advisor to Sandfly Security, a supplier of intrusion detection tools for Linux systems.

"All the frontier models have got very good at coding," Joyce noted. "In fact, OpenAI models are out-competing humans in many of the code competitions."

Case in point: The Hack The Box capture-the-flag contest ...