Cyber & IT Supervisory Forum - Additional Resources

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CYBERSECURITY RESEARCH

measures to prevent, protect against, mitigate, investigate and attribute such threats to security, competitiveness and resilience’ 109 . The most important mechanism introduced using AI in biotechnology 110 is the ability to automate complex tasks without direct supervision or to use cyberattacks to exploit bio automation for malicious purposes. At the same time, they are examples of 'dual-use research of concern' (DURC), i.e. technologies that clearly have positive impacts while opening up new opportunities that can also be exploited for malicious purposes (Pauwels, 2021). A major concern with AI, as discussed earlier, is explainability and the production of replicable and usable knowledge (Jordan et al., 2020). However, it has yet to be demonstrated with real evidence that bio-evolution can pose new specific threats that are not just an extension of the existing potential attack surface. Biometric systems show that it is more about proliferation of cybersecurity deployments than a real paradigm shift, but of course it seems a bit early to close this debate.

109 Peccoud, J., Gallegos, J. E., Murch, R., Buchholz, W. G., Raman, S. 2018. Cyberbiosecurity: From Naive Trust to Risk Awareness. Trends in Biotechnology, 36(1), 4-7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2017.10.012 110 This one is, in fact, a very diversified landscape, with obvious cross-fertilising possibilities among domains of application and disciplines, as, for instance, one of the primary uses of AI in the biofield is assistance to identify and model new proteins of high-potential pharma-oriented molecules.

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