Microsoft wants you to rethink your approach to cyber defense
Cyber defenders need to shake off traditional best practices and switch from reactive patching to building inherently resilient systems in the face of AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, according to a senior security manager at Microsoft. David Weston, group manager in the Windows team at Microsoft, told delegates at Black Hat USA that traditional approaches to vulnerability remediation fail to work in an era when AI tools are making vulnerability discovery and exploit development cheaper, faster, and more scalable. Weston’s keynote — entitled “The End of Rare: Defending When Offense Is Cheap” — challenged industry vulnerability best practices that Weston said where from a time when developing exploits and mounting attacks was time consuming and expensive. That’s no longer the case, he said. As evidence, Weston explained how the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is doubling the number of vulnerabilities it processes and patches every six weeks. “That is an incredible number,” he said. “We’re nine times the vulnerability volume that we were in March.” The accelerating pace of vulnerability discovery is “highly correlated” to rising use of increasingly capable AI tools, and presents a cross-industry problem, he said. “These are serious vulnerabilities, the kind that I used to take a year to bespoke craft,” Weston pointed out. “They’re being spit out at industrial speed, and it’s not [just] Windows. You look at Linux, you look at any other operating system out there, I think you’ll see a pretty strong correlation.” Microsoft’s MDASH, short for Multi-model Agentic Scanning Harness, found roughly 200 Linux kernel vulnerabilities in the company’s internal Azure Linux distribution that Microsoft is working with the community to fix. Microsoft also added a new module to MDASH to help its engineers triage vulnerabilities. The technology is capable of turning a static analysis result into proof-of-concept exploit code. “That’s worked much better than we ever thou Vendors: Microsoft, Google, Linux. DORA relevance: high.