🔥AI Singularity: Is Your Security Model Ready to Be Gaslit? 🧯🚒🤖🚩
Once upon a time, security teams worried about malware, misconfigurations, and interns clicking “Reply All.”
Now? We’re staring down the barrel of the AI Singularity - and suddenly our meticulously crafted security models feel like medieval armor in a cyberpunk street fight. 🏰🛡️🗡️
Now let’s call the spade, a spade …
Most current risk models were built for static threats and predictable adversaries.
AI doesn’t do static. It doesn’t do predictable.
In fact, adaptive AI thrives on our predictability - and that’s the existential problem.
📜 From Paperclips to Predators: A Brief History of Trust Gone Wrong
In the early 2000s, security was about building walls - firewalls, VPNs, perimeter defenses.
Then we learned (painfully) that trust boundaries are porous, users are fallible, and data flows like water. ⛲️
Fast-forward to now: we’ve trained language models on the sum total of human knowledge and nonsense, handed them control over critical processes, and asked: “Hey, could you help us stay secure?”
Let’s recall a little psychological truth from Milgram’s obedience experiments …
Humans are disturbingly willing to trust perceived authority - even when it makes zero sense.
Now imagine an AI authority figure, flawlessly mimicking your boss, your client, or your compliance officer.
Welcome to the golden age of gaslighting - AI edition. 🔥🤖🧯🚒
⚠️Your Risk Model Has Entered the Uncanny Valley
But wait … there’s more …. AI doesn’t need to breach your systems - AI just needs to exploit your trust.
• That phishing email? Generated in seconds, customised with public data, and indistinguishable from your CEO’s writing style.
• That “real-time video call”? Deepfaked.
• That incident report? Fabricated by a compromised LLM that’s now part of your workflow.
And yet, we still treat AI threats like malware with better marketing.
The psychology of deception—long studied in human adversaries—is now machine-optimised.
AI learns from your defenses.
It adapts to your incident response cadence.
It predicts your next move, because it already trained on your org chart, policies, and Slack channels. 👀
🎩Wisdom from the Past: Adapt or Be Automated
The Luddites weren’t afraid of machines - they were afraid of losing agency.
Today’s AI threat isn’t just automation—it’s autonomy, wielded by systems we don’t fully understand.
Historical lesson? Every technological leap demands a security reckoning.
AI is no different.
What’s different this time is speed, scale, and plausible deniability. 🫣
♟️Hard Truths and Strategy Shifts
Here’s where wisdom meets pragmatism.
1. Your controls need a reality check.
Legacy authentication and authorisation? Gaslightable.
Trust models? Ripe for manipulation.
Redesign for adversarial AI - because it’s not just “bad actors” anymore, it’s bad algorithms.
2. Privacy isn’t a luxury - it’s survival.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and Decentralized Identity (DID) aren’t buzzwords.
They’re defense strategies when the attacker has already seen your playbook.
3. Your board needs more than risk dashboards.
They need AI-native KPIs:
How often are our models audited for bias, poisoning, or manipulation?
Do we own our training data, or are we outsourcing our future liabilities to third parties?
What’s our incident response plan when AI impersonates our leadership team?
4. Prepare for psychological warfare.
Wargame AI deception scenarios.
Train teams to spot cognitive bias exploitation, not just phishing links.
Remember: AI can manipulate logic AND emotion - at scale.
❤️🩹 You Can’t Patch Complacency
In this new era, security is about reclaiming agency - against autonomous systems that operate with ruthless logic and zero accountability.
If your risk model can’t handle being gaslit, it’s not ready.
📌Own your AI. Own your security strategy.
Or prepare to explain to your board how a language model social-engineered your entire organisation before lunch.
Let’s be clear.
This isn’t fearmongering.
It’s a call to evolve - before AI does it for us.
🤔 Are you rethinking your security model for the AI Singularity?
Let’s talk - DM me. 🤙
Because the future is here - and it has read your risk policy. Twice.
👩🏻💻 www.justaskpenny.com