Black Hat and DEF CON are AI conferences now, too

KETTLE Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent last week in Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, and at both events there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders.

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As Jess wrote this week, pretty much every discussion she had last week centered around AI and its potential effects on critical infrastructure, with multiple current and former government leaders expressing worry over recent events and what they mean for the future of infosec.

Join Jess and host Brandon Vigliarolo for this week's episode of The Kettle, where they break down the hacker summer camp scuttlebutt and what the security world is doing to protect critical infrastructure from the emerging AI threat.

A lightly edited transcript is below.

Brandon (00:04) Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of The Register’s Kettle Podcast.

I'm Reg Reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and you know, I really thought doing a wrap up of Black Hat and DEF CON with our cybersecurity editor Jess Lyons would finally give us a chance to talk about something besides AI for an episode, but I was mistaken.

That's pretty much apparently all anyone was talking about in Las Vegas this weekend, even when the topic veered toward recent attacks on US water infrastructure, AI was still part of the conversation.

So Jess, thanks for coming on to wrap up Hacker Summer Camp with me and let's start with the obvious, then AI was the topic de jour, right? JESSICA (00:38) Yes, that was even compared to water, we really didn't hear much about water actually until DEF CON, which was surprising to me.

But it was all about rogue agents escaping their sandboxes and doing bad things and some people reacting with shock and disbelief and other people saying, “Well, what did you expect? They're given a task, they're going to do it.

This is how we train them.” Brandon (01:04) know you wrote a story I think pretty much right at the beginning of of the of the week about the OpenAI hugging face discussion that was going on and we actually covered your write up on last week's Kettle.

Sorry you weren't here to participate, but it was the news item of the week obviously and still is.

So what did we learn then? Just kinda recap what we learned at that talk that we didn't know before.