Your Security AI Needs A Flight Simulator

Lee Rossey is CTO of SimSpace, advancing AI proving grounds to help orgs prove cyber readiness.

By the time Captain Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III successfully landed U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after a bird strike took out both of the Airbus A320’s engines, he had almost 20,000 flight hours under his belt. ​

Yet even that much real-world experience couldn’t expose him to every emergency he might encounter in the air. He and his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, saved the lives of the 155 people onboard that day after facing a combination of circumstances few pilots will ever experience.

That’s why pilots don’t prepare for emergencies through real-world experience alone. Flight simulators allow flight instructors to introduce dangerous scenarios in a risk-free environment during training so pilots are prepared if they ever encounter such situations in real life.​​

Cybersecurity professionals can learn a lot from this approach, especially as AI-powered attacks introduce never-before-seen variables or combine known attack methods in new ways. Just as pilots can’t prepare for the worst using only situations they’ve encountered during real flights, security teams shouldn’t prepare for the next attack based only on their knowledge of past attacks.

Historical Data Isn’t Enough For Training

Historical telemetry has long been a useful tool for security teams. Knowing the types of attacks that have occurred in the past can inform scenarios to test in a simulated environment and assess how well defenses hold up against them.​

But historical data becomes more limiting when attackers are constantly learning new ways to circumvent defenses. That becomes even more true as AI expands the number of attack paths adversaries can explore. ​

Create The Data You Don’t Have​

Historical security data is valuable precisely because it comes from real events, but that means defenders have to experience an attack before they can collect data from it.​