Time to combine AI and security. Two flavors that taste better together.
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are partnering with the Biden administration to sponsor the “AI Cyber Challenge,” a cybersecurity challenge to protect critical US infrastructure. The challenge, hosted by DARPA, includes $20 million in prizes for the best systems that can identify and fix software vulnerabilities. Teams will compete in a qualifying event next spring, and the winners will compete in a semifinal event at next year’s Def Con. The top five teams will compete at the finals, which will be held at Def Con 2025. The challenge will ask winners to open-source their systems so everyone can use the innovations the challenge produces.
A new study finds that bots are better and faster than humans at cracking Captcha tests, which poses a significant threat to the internet as bots can perform harmful operations like scraping content, creating accounts, and posting fake comments or reviews. The study assessed 200 popular websites and found that many bots could beat humans in both speed and accuracy, with the bots’ accuracy ranging from 85-100% and their solving times being significantly lower or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases.
Just observe that robots are better than humans at the test designed to see if a user is a human or a bot. Maybe time to get rid of those and look at other approaches, huh? There’s $20M in prizes for new ideas.