Preparing for a Cybersecurity Catastrophe

In light of the recent spate of AI-assisted hacks, some of the shortfalls with our current cybersecurity catastrophe response capability need to be urgently addressed. In this piece, I look into the areas where cybersecurity incident response are important, and why existing response measures are insufficient. I explore options for governments and smaller stakeholders to improve their resilience against catastrophic hacking incidents. 1. Background AI agents have demonstrated alarming capabilities in hacking and enabling hackers. We have seen malicious individuals or organizations take advantage of advanced AI cyber capabilities to increase the speed and sophistication of their hacks. We have also seen rogue agent swarms in the wild, and it is now theoretically possible for such swarms to survive all on their own with "reappropriated" resources, given that agents have separately demonstrated the ability to steal compute and steal money . As others have pointed out, it is also demonstrably possible for agentic worms to form and propagate , and in the future sufficiently small models may be able to take advantage of the vast amount of IoT compute in the world, most of which is less ad