Top cyber defence consultancies are operating at near “full capacity” after a surge of AI-enabled cyberattacks over the past year, a leading risk advisor has warned.
“There’s an interesting dynamic right now in the market where the best incident response shops, […] are all almost full on capacity,” Kroll’s risk advisory president, Brent Tomlinson, told .
Over the last year, scores of high profile firms have been hit by cyberattacks. The retail sector has been particularly badly affected, with M&S, Co-op and Asos all facing huge disruption to their operations after hacking incidents. Last week, supermarket refrigerators at retailers across Europe, as well as France’s national blood service, were targeted in attacks that raised their temperatures.
Cyber incident response is a structured process businesses use to detect, contain, eradicate, and recover from a cyberattack or security breach.
Businesses with a robust response to a hack can avoid financial or reputation issues, Tomlinson said, adding that incident firms were now struggling to take on new work due to the scale of demand.
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SUBSCRIBE HERE“I’ve never seen that before,” he said, adding that the firm’s team was working “24/7”.
Last month, telecoms giant BT revealed it would launch a new managed security service using Microsoft technology to capitalise on growing demand for cyber defence.
AI’s big promise, bigger risks
The risk chief also pointed out that AI may transform businesses, with billions being poured into advanced technology. However, he warned that investors could still lose a lot of money.
“AI will be a wildly successful transformational technology. It doesn’t mean it’s a good investment,” Tomlinson said.
In the professional services sector, firms have pumped a lot of money into frontier AI tools that have fundamentally changed tasks traditionally done by juniors. But the return-on-investment question has fuelled fears that AI firms may be overvalued.
Technology stocks plunged in the US last week after the Democrats swept to victory in the mid-term elections, prompting fears they would stall data centre roll-out.