UVA receiving federal funds to help fight cyberattacks

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D) is working to fund training that aims to help AI fight cyber attacks.

Sen. Warner, who is also the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, announced $1.8 million in federal funding is going towards these efforts.

Warner says AI has huge potential: “This could be a whole new industry,” the senator said. “There’s going to be newer jobs and growth created around the artificial intelligence field.”

“Machines are really good at recognizing patterns and dealing with the complexities, understand what’s going on in the network, but there’s a challenge of can you present that to a human analyst in a way that they can understand and make decisions?” Professor of Computer Science David Evans said. “A lot of the focus of the work that my group will do at UVA is about understanding things adversaries might do to adapt to what the AI defensive systems are doing.”

Sen. Warner says the University of Virginia and Norfolk State University were chosen for their expertise in cybersecurity.

UVA is receiving $845,000, with $975,000 is going to NSU.

“Adversaries can use AI to discover vulnerabilities and craft their attacks and make them more automated,” Evans said. “The defenders can use AI to observe what’s going on a network, to protect it, to make it more resilient, and to help the humans that are designing and responding to attacks.”

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