In recent weeks, there have been increasing warnings in both the tech press and the general press about a coming “Bugmageddon” sparked by the use of AI models to find and exploit hidden vulnerabilities in applications and operating systems. I can’t decide how much of this is a realistic four-alarm concern, vs. hype and clickbait.
It’s probably safe to assume that the Norton team will itself be using AI to devise ways to protect customers from new AI-assisted threats. But in the meantime, before Norton comes up with these new protections, how well protected are Norton 360 users?
As an example of the effect this fearmongering is having, the other day, I actually overheard someone saying that they were disconnecting their home router until they felt confident that their AV vendor had taken care of these emerging AI threats. (Not sure how they expected to find out, if they cut themselves off from the Internet like this.)
@JorgeA That is a great question which deserves a definite legitimate answer. One only Norton themselves can properly provide that answer for.
@Chock_Norton @Norton_Ghost
My opinion is. The answer itself depends on how dedicated Norton is to a protective posture, and, doing so without degrading usability on the customer side. That all boils down to a common boilerplate tech industries are using in real time today. Its “what they will allow” regarding consumers changing settings and hardcoding their protection features to prevent tampering.
One thing of note is, AI, is a double edged sword. Hackers and nation states, use it to find exploits while vendors use it in a 180 degree fashion, to also find those exploits to patch. So where is the difference between the two? The " time to live usage " between the discovery of exploits, creation of exploits that work and how fast the vendors implement that into their products.
SA
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Thanks SA, I have no doubt that Norton is working to pre-emptively deal with exploits found by AI, but it would be great to get official confirmation of it.
OTOH, I also wonder just how much more vulnerable we’d be even if there was a time lag between the discovery of an exploit by AI-using hackers, and AV vendors’ plugging of the hole. After all, while the number of vulnerabilities found by AI might be large, there are only so many ways to implement malware. I have to think that N360’s monitoring for suspicious behavior should work to stop most exploit attempts even if they were just discovered. As I understand it, this is what N360’s Exploit Prevention is for. It combats zero-day attacks and all these expected new attacks found by AI are basically zero-days.
Hopefully there isn’t a “bug” in my thinking! 
Yes, Norton uses online detection systems to check everything as close to real time as possible. At times, it does get too “over zealous” with things and causes issues. Generally those get noticed fairly quickly and we expedite things here to Norton when they are posted.
SA
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