AI makes it easy to expose holes in Army’s unified network, official says

BALTIMORE — As the Army modernizes its network, the availability of artificial intelligence capabilities is presenting new opportunities for the network to be compromised, a top Army IT official said today.

“The threat now is a different spot. These new AI capabilities [are] lowering the barrier of entry and exposing more of our attack service,” David Markowitz, deputy chief information officer and chief data and analytics officer for the Army, said at the TechNet Cyber conference here today. “We really need to better understand our unified network, rapidly understand where those attacks may be coming in … and be able to ingest the threat and act faster than any adversary.”

In 2021, the Army sought to modernize its network, developing what it termed the unified network — a singular network for all of the service. Previously, the service siloed portions of its IT architecture between the enterprise level, used primarily at static locations leveraging common office functions, and the tactical or expeditionary space for battlefield communications and data.

With all data under now under a single architecture, Markowitz noted the service must better understand the ins and outs of the network, especially in the face of a growing threat of emerging AI tools that are making it easier for attackers to exploit holes.

“The ability to see a threat very rapidly and make a change and say, ‘That’s got to go off right now, it’s got to be patched, we’re going to do something very different because of threats in our knickers,’” he said. “We have not had that type of challenge. It is before us, and we need to be able to adapt rapidly, so that we can move faster than any adversary.”

The hardest barrier to these changes is likely cultural, he explained. It involves getting personnel the right training and changing the bureaucracy into more of an operational mindset as opposed to a compliance or checklist based posture.