PODCAST:
July 9, 2026 ~ Chris Renwick and Lloyd Jackson spoke with Gregory Laidlaw, cybersecurity department chair at the University of Detroit. They discussed AI’s impact on cyber threats and the need for guardrails and oversight.
The rise of publicly available AI technology is giving cyber criminals more tools to use to commit cyber attacks, experts warn, making it easy for them to find vulnerabilities in systems and software.
Gregory Laidlaw, cybersecurity department chair at the University of Detroit Mercy, told WJR that AI is making hacking more possible for bad actors by giving them more power and reasoning. He added that previous attacks had to be done by humans manually, alongside a lot of computing/coding knowledge to put together complex plans and attacks. Now, AI can do much of this all on its own.
“(A.I.) makes them more capable of seeing things that humans really can’t,” he said. “Where if we’re doing this by hand, we might look at a system and see 10 vulnerabilities that might be worth exploiting, and we’d pick, as humans, the ones that look more promising. Well, if you’re on an AI system, you can do all 10 or all 100.“
