Video / Short
Massive Cyber Threat : Virus Could Crash Half the World's Servers!
Pete Cooper describes an unreleased AI tool that he says can surface software vulnerabilities sitting undiscovered for decades, and why he believes it is going to selected companies rather than the public. He walks through who he expects to get access first and what trickles down from there.
Video summary
Pete Cooper describes a model so powerful, in his telling, that its makers do not want to release it to the public, and are instead giving it to large technology companies so they can tighten up their own systems. He refers to it in the clip as a virus, though the capability he goes on to describe is finding vulnerabilities rather than spreading between machines.
His specific claims are made in conversation and are not attributed to a source on screen. He says the model has been run against software vulnerabilities that have been sitting in systems such as Linux for 25 years, and that if one of those were exposed through the tool you could take down literally half the servers in the world. He names Microsoft and Amazon as recipients, and later places JP Morgan in the same group.
His reasoning for keeping it restricted is that bad actors would otherwise get hold of it and go straight after those vulnerabilities, so defenders need to get ahead of it first. He expects access to roll outward in layers, from the large technology companies to financial institutions hardening their systems, and eventually down to everyone else.
Video transcript
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If that vulnerability is exposed through this new tool, you know, you can take down literally half the servers in the world with it with this fire with this virus. Oh, it's it's threatening the world if you want to take it that way. It is so powerful that they don't want to release it to the public. They're releasing it to the likes of Microsoft and Amazon. So that they can use it to to tighten up their systems. And what they they found when they run this model on software vulnerabilities that have been sitting in there like Linux for 25 years.
And if that vulnerability's exposed through this new tool, you know, you can take down literally half the servers in the world with it with this fire with this virus. They're written on Linux and they're written on you know, stuff that's less than 20 years old and they have vulnerabilities that no one's even aware of. They can't release this to us to the general public because there'll be the bad actors out there who just get it and just go straight after those vulnerabilities. So they need to get ahead of it. And that's going to trickle down, I think. JP Morgan's included in that group as well. And then there'll be this next layer of things coming through.
All the financial institutions are going to have to harden their stuff up. They're going to have access to it and then and it'll roll down to the likes of you and me. Who would have thought that that was coming? >> [gasps] >> I didn't. That's that's not something I think we really realized was going to be an option whenever