Cybersecurity: Protecting Against Nation-State Cyber Attacks

Last month’s heist of $6 billion in crypto from Binance by North Korean hackers highlights the ever-growing risks associated with nation-state cyber attacks. This Harvard Governance Blog post by Martin Lipton and his Wachtell colleagues says that this is an issue that merits significant attention from public company boards, and makes some specific recommendations about the actions that boards should take. This excerpt discusses how AI tools should be used in efforts to defend against attacks of this nature:

– Strengthen layered defenses with AI assisted tools. AI tools are already uncovering latent vulnerabilities in corporate systems, and their reach will only grow. The question is not whether AI will be used to probe a company’s systems, but whether the company’s own security function will have done so first and have undertaken timely remediation. Boards should oversee management’s framework for risk based use of AI assisted vulnerability assessment and other defensive tools, alongside established security controls, timely remediation, and appropriate human oversight and safeguards for sensitive information.

Other recommendations include ensuring that sufficient resources are dedicated to this threat, enhancing transactional cyber due diligence, providing appropriate oversight to management’s assessment, monitoring and mitigation of risks posed by third party vendors, and preparing and rehearsing incident response plans.