New Delhi: In the age of robotics and wearables, it is not hard to imagine a situation where the software is itself the hacker-malicious and unmalicious. But how close are we to the future where we have no human hackers?
The US military's research arm, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), believes that there is a possibility of having robot hackers in near future and it is just a matter of time that they will replace conventional hackers in flesh and blood as automated security software or a robot hacker could help hack other software, find bugs, and fix it quicker than human hackers, with little or no margin for error.
Mike Walker, a program manager at DARPA, said last year, "I believe the world series of hacking will soon be won by a machine," a Motherboard report quotes him.
DEF CON, which is one of the world's largest hacking conferences, next year will host the first 'capture the flag' for computers only, where machines and not hackers, will compete against each other for a prize of $2 million in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge.
For this one-of-its-kind challenge, more than 100 teams of computer security experts around the world are building machines that might replace the human hackers.
While conventional hackers see it as a way of making robots stealing the future of human hackers, for the US' military research wing, automation is the only way towards a more secure future.
Walker said that the only effective approach to defending against the modern-day hack attacks is to switch to fully automated systems capable of discovering and neutralizing attacks instantly.
Given the scale and intensity of modern cyber breaches, it makes more sense to have machines that never sleep and perform better, with calculations possible on per second rate, than humans.
However, the catch remains the same. You still require human hackers to program these mean machines to tell them what exactly to look for while scanning for bugs and how to treat them, lest they turn against their own bearers.
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