INTERPOL's Security Chief Says AI Defense Starts With One Question

INTERPOL's security chief has bravely gone where no press release has gone before and revealed that the first question in AI defence is: who is actually attacking you? Revolutionary stuff. Presumably question two is whether the attackers would mind terribly stopping, and question three is whether there's any budget left after the incident-response retainer. He is, to be fair, technically correct — opportunistic criminals and advanced persistent threat actors do require different defences, in the same way a house cat and a brown bear require different approaches to the front door — but that is a threat-modelling diagram from a 2014 security certification, wearing a headline.

The answer to the one question is sitting right there in the piece, which spares everyone the suspense: TeamT5 has found that Chinese state-affiliated groups more than doubled their attack volume after adopting open-source AI models. More than doubled. Not 'showed early promise'. Not 'ran a controlled pilot'. The open-weight movement, blessed be its utopian soul, has spent years arguing that handing out model weights is a net good for humanity, and here comes a threat-intelligence firm to explain that the net includes a doubling of state-sponsored intrusion volume. The free tier, it turns out, works.

Meanwhile the headline effect on the modern boardroom is that cyber risk is 'climbing corporate risk registers' — which is executive for: we've noticed, we've added a line item, and we've done precisely nothing else. Every time INTERPOL turns up in a story it is the last body standing between critical infrastructure and a teenager with a fine-tuned model, and its preferred instruments remain the annual report and the strongly worded communiqué. So the one question isn't 'who is attacking you'. It's 'and what, precisely, is anyone planning to do about it, beyond asking nicely from a conference stage?'