AI emerges as a cybersecurity teammate

On its own artificial intelligence isn’t a solution to cybersecurity issues, but new data from Hack The Box, a platform for building attack-ready teams and organizations, reveals that cybersecurity teams are increasingly beginning to adopt AI as a copilot for solving security challenges.

Based on real-world performance data from over 4,000 global participants in Hack The Box’s Global Cyber Skills Benchmark, a large-scale capture the flag competition, the report highlights how cyber teams are starting to use AI as a teammate to their security staff.

It finds that 44 percent of teams used AI tools during the simulation, mostly for syntax help and concept clarification. However, fewer than eight percent of teams used AI to solve challenges in full, suggesting its role remains assistive rather than foundational.

While AI skills are maturing, 66 percent of teams didn’t use it in any capacity at all, showing there’s still opportunity for growth.
 
Fundamental, mission-critical security skills are a cause for concern too with secure coding (18.7 percent), web (21.1 percent), and cloud (21.3 percent) challenges, key skills to modern digital infrastructure, having the lowest solve rates.

Haris Pylarinos, CEO and founder at Hack The Box, says:

AI is undoubtedly helping teams move faster, but should be used to augment security efforts, rather than replace human-led knowledge. Security works best when AI is deployed in partnership with a highly trained security team, who are able to support decision-making with automated data and AI tools.

It’s encouraging to see teams begin to adopt AI for foundational support during this year’s Cyber Skills Benchmark -- but there is room for this to grow. Monitoring the performance of AI and humans together is the next step to develop proactive security practices.

The overall lesson here is that AI tools are best used in tandem with human knowledge, given that each has complementary strengths. AI works at speed and can easily execute time-intensive manual tasks, while human judgment can add intuition, context, and situational judgment. In today’s security environment, the optimal workflow incorporates both. An over reliance on one, be that humans or AI tooling, can amplify underlying security weaknesses and introduce subtle, hard-to-detect vulnerabilities.

The full report is available from the Hack The Box site.

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