"These incidents involve the intentional use of deceptive or illegal practices to fraudulently obtain money, assets, or information from individuals or institutions, and include actions carried out over cyber channels."
Threat hunting is in flux. What started as a largely reactive skill became proactive and is progressing toward automation. Threat hunting is the practice of finding threats within the system. It sits between external attack surface management (EASM), and the security operations center (SOC). EASM seeks to thwart attacks by protecting the interface between the network and the internet. If it fails, and an attacker gets into the system, threat hunting seeks to find and monitor the traces left by the adversary so the attack can be neutralized before damage can be done. SOC engineers take new threat hunter data and build new detection rules for the SIEM.
I've always had what I would consider a hacker mindset, a curiosity to take things apart, understand them, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That mindset took me on a circuitous route into the cybersecurity industry; after being kicked out of high school for hacking computer systems, I worked a range of jobs, managing office supply companies by day and cracking Wi-Fi networks by night until I started a Digital Forensics degree which led me to the world of security research.
The most dangerous assumption in quality engineering right now is that you can validate an autonomous testing agent the same way you validated a deterministic application. When your systems can reason, adapt, and make decisions on their own, that linear validation model collapses.
AI agents and other systems can't yet conduct cyberattacks fully on their own - but they can help criminals in many stages of the attack chain, according to the International AI Safety report. The second annual report, chaired by the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio and authored by more than 100 experts across 30 countries, found that over the past year, developers of AI systems have vastly improved their ability to help automate and perpetrate cyberattacks.