AI and humans battle it out in a cybersecurity showdown

LAS VEGAS : On a recent Friday morning, seven cybersecurity veterans gathered in a suite on the 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas. Surrounded by laptops, network cables, spare Wi-Fi antennas and a wall-mounted television that doubled as a massive computer screen filled with esoteric programming code, they spent the next two days hacking into a computer network in San Antonio as part of an annual event called the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

AI and humans battle it out in a cybersecurity showdown. LAS VEGAS : On a recent Friday morning, seven cybersecurity veterans gathered in a suite on the 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas. Surrounded by laptops, network cables, spare Wi-Fi antennas and a wall-mounted television that doubled as a massive computer screen filled with esoteric programming code, they spent the next two days hacking into a computer network in San Antonio as part of an annual event called the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. As this “red team” of cybersecurity professionals attacked the network, dozens of elite computer science students in makeshift command centres across the country tried to stop them. “Any time we gain access to their machines and steal data, they lose points,” said Alex Levinson, one of the leaders of the red team...