One of my favourite cyber security maxims is Halvar Flake’s observation that “All offensive problems are technical problems, and all defensive problems are political problems”.
For an attacker conducting offensive cyber actions, the problems that need to be solved are largely technical. They might be:
‘Do I have an exploit for this vulnerability?’
or
‘How do I avoid detection?’
Whilst defenders also have technical challenges, they mostly wrestle with what Halvar describes as ‘political’ problems (which for the purposes of this discussion can be framed as organisational problems). Problems such as:
‘Can we get budget to replace this end-of-life system or invest in a more secure option?’
‘How do I get IT operations to make time for patching?’
‘How do we get a change request to put in firewall rules approved?’
In other words, defenders are most restricted by their organisational policies, whilst most attackers are restricted by technical hurdles. The reason for this difference becomes clear when you compare the core purposes of attackers and defenders.
For attackers, their core purpose is ‘to conduct cyber offence’ and success will cause their employer to profit. Whether that’s stealing money from organisations, extorting victims, or exfiltrating information. Cyber offence is their raison d’être.
For the defenders, their mission is to help their organisation avoid loss. Their employer’s mission isn’t cyber defence; it will depend upon whatever activity that organisation does (such as developing products, treating patients, or providing digital services). Cyber defence is effectively ‘a cost of doing business’, one of many priorities that the organisation has to manage.
This means the cost of cyber defence has to be rigorously assessed to make sure it does not harm the organisation’s competing priorities:
‘Could that money earmarked to replace the end-of-life system be better used on marketing?’
‘Will that patch take down the VPN?’
‘How sure are we that the firewall rule will not break a business function that relies on that connectivity?’
Some board members may see little difference between a DoS attack taking down the organisation’s IT, or a poorly implemented action by the cyber defence team that does the same thing. Except that the board can’t shout at an attacker over the phone …
Agentic tooling can be used for cyber offence, because AI is good at helping with technical problems with a clearly measurable success state. Offensive problems are mostly technical, and usually have a clear success state (the target program crashes, your malware calls home). But defensive problems, as we’ve established above, are not mostly technical. Nor do they always have a clear success state.
Using AI automation for defence therefore quickly becomes a matter of organisational politics, and someone needs to be responsible for the action taken. Defenders simply cannot put AI to work in the same way attackers can. This is an inconvenient truth, as it suggests that the threat from AI-enabled cyber attacks will grow, whilst autonomous / agentic cyber defence might struggle to keep up unless we approach things differently.
