Artificial intelligence threatens one of the most important pillars of Internet security

Bethlehem - Ofoq News - Google announced the temporary suspension of one of its main programs to reward the discovery of security vulnerabilities, after dealing with the increasing number of reports generated by artificial intelligence became difficult to continue.

The program, which was frozen, focuses on monitoring critical vulnerabilities in open source software.

These programs are known as “bug bounty programs,” as they give security researchers financial rewards for reporting the vulnerabilities they discover, allowing them to be fixed before malicious parties exploit them. Major technology companies rely on these programs as a means to enhance the security of their products and services, and they also provide security researchers with a financial incentive to report vulnerabilities instead of exploiting them to launch attacks.

However, artificial intelligence has begun to change this equation, as it has become easy to use it to produce a large number of security reports in a short period, but a large percentage of them are not based on real problems. Google said in a post on the “X” platform that the decision to suspend the program came as a result of “a significant increase in the number of reports submitted automatically,” noting that the vast majority of them “are not based on a valid basis.”

The problem is not limited to the increase in the number of reports, but also extends to the time and effort that engineers need to examine them. When a security team receives thousands of inaccurate reports, it becomes difficult for it to reach the real vulnerabilities that need to be fixed.

These developments raise broader concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on Internet security. Previous warnings focused on the ability of advanced models to help hackers discover vulnerabilities that can be exploited to carry out attacks, but Google’s experience shows that artificial intelligence may cause a different kind of problem, which is flooding security teams with automated reports that are difficult to verify.

Google is not the only company facing this problem. The influx of poorly made, and often inaccurate, reports has increased the burden on engineers and complicated their ability to identify real security problems. Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, said that the “constant stream of reports generated by artificial intelligence” had made security work “almost impossible to manage.” It also appeared that Intel last month closed a similar program for rewards for discovering vulnerabilities, through which it offered rewards of up to $100,000, without the company explicitly explaining that artificial intelligence was the reason behind closing the program.