Can we protect ourselves from AI-powered cybercrime? | David Hughes
episodePreviously titled “Can we protect ourselves from AI-powered cybercrime?” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 27, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, Michael.
Good afternoon, Sam. How are you? How are you today?
I am doing pretty well. How are you doing?
I'm very good. Have you played any games recently? I know you mentioned that you're a gamer on the podcast several times.
Yes.
What sort of games do you play, Sam?
All kinds. I love like cozy games, like a good farming sim from time to time. I used to back in the day be into like MMORPGs, but those are very time consuming games.
You got all the right lingo. Anyway, Sam, when you're playing these games, do you feel like you're constantly having to adjust what you're doing to counter the threats or the villains or the enemy or potentially even other players as their gaming style develops?
Sometimes, yes. I'd say generally, like as you're ramping up into a game, yes.
I think I'm very much, I will get very comfortable in that playing style and then an enemy will do something completely different and then it will completely throw me. I'm not a good strategist. But sadly, much as I'd love to discuss video games, we are going to be talking about real life and how everything is changing in the world of AI. Of course it is. Of course it is. I'm Michael Bird.
I'm Sam Jarrell. And welcome to Technology Now from HPE.
Now, Sam, as technology becomes more and more integrated into our lives, the number of cyber attacks has skyrocketed. Analysis published by Total Assure last year predicted around 803 million cyber attacks per day around the world, a staggering number, with approaching 300 million of those attacks becoming full incidents. We will, of course, link to this in the show notes. Crazy numbers, eh?
That is insane. It seems like the threats only continue to rise, whether it's like an institution or like the spam texts that you get when someone's trying to impersonate like the mail service and say that you owe fees. But of course, we do have security in place to try and prevent these attacks going anywhere.
Yeah, we do. And also the same technology which attackers leverage can also be used defensively. Things like AI can be used to spot threats or really anything that doesn't look right to try and keep our organizations and our data safe.
And we've also discussed things like zero trust on this podcast before.
Have no fear, Sam, it will come up in today's interview. However, my conversation with David Hughes, Senior VP of SASE and Security at HP Networking covers far more than just zero trust because even networks themselves can be used as a sensor for security. However, before we get into any of that, I wanted to set the scene a little bit. So the first thing I asked David to tell me was, what does the current threat landscape actually look like in 2026?
So the threat landscape today is getting every year intensified, both in terms of scale and speed and the kind of industrialization. And it changes quickly, right? Absolutely. And particularly with the injection of AI and agentic AI, generative AI, change is continuing to accelerate.
And I guess with AI, from an attacker's perspective, it makes everything much easier, maybe more automated.
Well, yeah, there's lots of different ways that attackers can use AI. But when you think about agentic AI, it allows them to be able to automate a move more quickly without having to write automation code. They can be driving these systems with plain English language and be able to operate at scale around the clock. you're able to run 24 by seven. And if you want to cover more ground, you just start more agents. Yeah.
AI doesn't need to sleep. No. Can you just sort of describe some of the more common threats that we have at the moment?
Well, there's all kinds of threats, but obviously there's different kinds of things people are after. They can be after credentials, so trying to steal people's credentials, which is a base for doing something else in future. There's being able to take control, install remote access Trojans so that they can control someone's laptop or computer. There's ransomware where your data is encrypted and then you need to pay to get keys to decrypt that data.
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