AI-discovered bugs may soon trigger fresh disruptions

Say cyber experts

Advances in artificial intelligence have uncovered a stream of new software vulnerabilities that are almost ​certain to trigger more disruption along the lines of the outages that percolated across global government websites this week, according to seven cybersecurity professionals who spoke to ‌Reuters.

AI helped drive a doubling of the number of digital flaws discovered year-on-year, according to research due to be published in the coming days by VulnCheck, a Massachusetts-based threat intelligence firm.

Matthew Prince, the chief executive of Cloudflare, opens new tab, told Reuters he was aware of “a bunch of additional severe vulnerabilities that are present in other pieces of critical software” and predicted busy months ahead as AI surfaced long-hidden weaknesses in ​fabric of the internet.