As more than 150 technology, cybersecurity, and financial organizations warn of accelerating AI-enabled attacks, WinMagic CEO Thi Nguyen-Huu says the industry uses cryptography in pieces, and the gap between the login and everything after it is what attackers take.
“We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses.” That is from the letter signed this week by more than 150 of the largest technology, security and financial companies: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS and Anthropic among them. They warn that AI-enabled attacks will become far more widespread and more sophisticated in the coming months, and that the status quo won’t be enough.
The letter lists what has left systems exposed and ask for industry collaboration and higher security standards. Most of that list, including patching, tightening the permissions, fixing the misconfiguration, is hard work, but none of it addresses the foundational weakness: weak authentication. Those items matter, but we want to focus on the hardest one, and the one we believe we can fix. The industry has worked hard here too, from passwords to MFA and from MFA to passkeys, and attackers still get in: Proofpoint reported in December 2024 that almost half of the accounts taken over by bad actors had MFA configured.