This webinar is for Australian Local Government Staff only.
AI models are becoming very good at finding and exploiting weaknesses in software. They can do it faster, at greater scale, and often more cheaply than human operators. The Five Eyes partners, through their national cybersecurity agencies, have publicly highlighted this trend.
But when we look at what is actually being exploited, the reality is less dramatic than the headlines suggest. In most cases, AI is not discovering entirely new classes of vulnerabilities. Instead, it is finding and taking advantage of the same weaknesses that have always existed, just much more quickly.
The unpatched server. The legacy system nobody wants to touch. The account without multi-factor authentication. The administrative privileges granted years ago and never reviewed. These are still the weaknesses that attackers rely on. AI is not so much creating new holes as it is shortening the time between a weakness existing and someone finding and exploiting it.
Peter Jakowetz will present a brief, jargon-free overview of AI and frontier models, and what they change from a cybersecurity perspective. He will then focus on the central message of this talk: most "AI risk" is really existing risk moving at machine speed. If your applications and environments are insecure today, that remains the core problem, regardless of whether the attacker is a person or an AI-enabled system.
He will also look at practical, real-world examples of how organisations can better secure what they already have, drawing on both experience and industry data. The goal is to focus on proven controls that reduce risk now, rather than chasing every new headline.
About the Presenter:
Peter Jakowetz
Managing Director
PrivSec Consulting
Peter is the Managing Director of PrivSec Consulting, a Wellington based boutique Privacy and Security consultancy. With a background working in both Government and commercial organisations throughout NZ of various sizes, he understands and appreciates the need for targeted, appropriate advice and assessment to aid organisations within their own risk profile and tolerance.
