"GenAI gives cybersecurity attacker an asymmetric advantage," says Akamai's CEO

Generative Artificial Intelligence has given cybersecurity attackers an asymmetric advantage, noted Akamai Technologies' CEO, Tom Leighton. While speaking to Business Today, the CEO of the cybersecurity company addressed various topics, including cybersecurity challenges, investments, and sustainability.

“GenAI gives an asymmetric advantage to the attacker,” said Dr Leighton. “It really makes life better for the attacker, and we've had folks in the lab that have used Gen AI to quickly make some pretty sophisticated bots, and quickly more malware into a lot of different variations, which makes it much harder for the defender to guard against. So I think this is resulting in an increased volume of attacks and variety of attacks. And that's not a great situation.”

Cybersecurity challenges in India

The CEO of the cybersecurity company acknowledged the remarkable pace of digitisation in India but expressed concern about the lag in cybersecurity infrastructure. This has led to an increasing demand in cybersecurity needs, he added.

“There is a need for cybersecurity education in India. So, on that score, I'd say it's a pretty exciting time in India, and in the marketplace, you know, I think there's a lot of customers that are very interested in cybersecurity, we've been doing application firewall for a long time,” the CEO explained.

Several research reports have highlighted how India’s cybersecurity infrastructure has not been keeping pace with digital transformation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review CyberDefense Index (CDI) has placed India at a discouraging 17th position out of 20. 

Moreover, data from cybersecurity firm CheckPoint Research showed that weekly cyberattacks in India’s private sector have increased by 18 per cent in India in 2023, as against an increase of 7 per cent globally.

As per data from Meity Ministry, in the first half of 2023, 36 government websites experienced hacking incidents, and over 4.29 lakh cyber security incidents related to financial institutions were recorded. 

Furthermore, according to the Tenable Security Response report, a total of 2.29 billion records or points of data were exposed worldwide in 2022. India accounted for 20 per cent  of the total records or data points exposed worldwide.

Sustainability at data centres

The CEO said that sustainability in data centers is a critical concern globally. He acknowledged the energy challenge in data centers and the need to balance the sustainability equation. However, he pointed out that cybersecurity is not as energy-intensive as data centers, making it easier to address sustainability concerns in this context.

Dr Leighton noted that to address this issue, governments are taking up some measures.

He said, “It's the data centers and the compute, because they're burning a lot of CPU. And there is a cost there today, and that I think, there will be now, some governments may make it more balanced by taxing, you know, unclean, you know, sources of energy, and then it becomes imbalanced to incent companies to go with clean sources. Cybersecurity is much easier, because, the compute overhead is pretty low.”