Dell Security Chief Warns AI Is Lowering Barriers to Sophisticated Cyberattacks
Dell CSO says AI is lowering cyberattack barriers; Dell uses AI and Anthropic's Project Glasswing to defend systems.
Scimone said agentic AI has not erased the hierarchy of hacktivists, criminal gangs and nation-states, but it has given lower-tier actors tools once reserved for the top. “I think the pyramid still exists, but undoubtedly the cost of entry and the barriers to entry have crumbled,” he said. “Said another way, the least sophisticated attack tomorrow is more sophisticated than the world will have ever seen a year ago.”
Scimone spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante in an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. The discussion covered financial transformation and using AI to defend against AI threats, according to SiliconANGLE.
Dell is already putting frontier models to work on its own defenses and is a partner in Anthropic PBC’s Project Glasswing, Scimone said. The program gives vetted organizations access to powerful AI tools to secure critical systems. It has drawn new members and was recently folded into a broader verification program. Scimone said the fundamentals of identity, access management and detection still apply, but attacks now arrive at a speed and scale that make yesterday’s practices insufficient.
“We as cybersecurity professionals are going to have to use AI to defend against AI,” he said. “There’s a huge opportunity really to be able to leverage this capability for good.”
Scimone said the opportunity could matter most to organizations that have never been able to staff a full security team. Agents can deliver scale and expertise that smaller companies could never hire or build on their own, he said. “Our future security program might be a security program of one person, but it might have 10,000 agents, all of which are the best security practitioners in the space and the roles in which they’re assigned,” he added.
Editor's Summary
Dell CSO John Scimone said agentic AI is reducing the cost and skill barriers for cyberattacks, giving lower-tier actors capabilities once limited to advanced groups. Dell is using AI models, including through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, to defend critical systems, and Scimone said AI agents could let small security teams operate at new scale.