Allie Mellen
The cyber threat landscape is growing darker, with sophisticated teen hacker groups, global hacktivists and nation-state actors joining the fray as AI exacerbates the challenges of defending organisations.
It is war, said speakers at an executive dinner for CISOs ahead of the annual ITWeb Security Summit in Sandton this week.
Allie Mellen, principal analyst at Forrester and author of ‘Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield’, said AI was a priority security concern for organisations. “AI can be used to automate attacks and find and exploit vulnerabilities,” she said. “The biggest threat is that when you automate attacks with AI, the tempo of attacks increases and they become more dynamic.”
She noted that it is extremely difficult to use AI to fight AI, saying that in many cases it does not give organisations the information they need at the right time. She urged best-practice cyber hygiene – such as proper patching schedules – to protect against known vulnerability exploits.
Joe Tidy, dedicated cyber correspondent at the BBC and author of ‘Ctrl+Alt+Chaos’, said that while AI-enabled cyber threat syndicates were seen as a key threat, not enough attention was given to three other types of attackers. “The number of teenage hackers is growing, and it’s not about the money for them. They want chaos and infamy,” he said. “Another threat group is hacktivists: whenever there is a flare-up of conflict, there is hacktivism designed to cause chaos.”
A third growing risk is the insider threat, he noted, in which malicious actors convince an employee to enable access to an organisation’s systems.
Joe Tidy
The dinner, hosted by Silensec and Palo Alto Networks CyberArk, highlighted how AI has changed the cyber security landscape, making it vital for organisations to secure every identity across the enterprise – including human, machine and agentic AI – and improve visibility and control across critical systems.
Pauline Omollo, head of sales and business development for Africa at Silensec, said: “We are in a cyber war together. It has become a game in which the attackers are collaborating, so we have to collaborate as well. We need each other – we know what the problem is and what the solution is, and we have to evolve together.”
Craig Harwood, AVP of sales for Africa and the Middle East at Palo Alto Networks CyberArk, told CISOs: “Traditional parameters died around 2012. Identity is the new perimeter, and frontier AI means we need to move faster.”
He added that machine and agentic AI identities far outnumber human identities on networks, making real-time privileged access controls crucial.
