New Podcast – Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Society – With Vilija Vainaite

Welcome Vilija Vainaite, co-founder of Women 4 Cyber Netherlands, and of Encode Europe.

Vilija is author of a research paper on “Scarcity of Trust in the Post-Truth Age”, which forms part of the basis for this conversation. The paper discusses the impact of disruptive technology such as AI on societal cohesion, and can be found here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4835643

Today, we discuss AI. Specifically, governance aspects of AI, and its societal impact, with a specific focus on cybersecurity – attacks, defence, human intervention, regulation, and more.

Notes and Links:

06:10 Dartmouth Summer Research Project: https://home.dartmouth.edu/about/artificial-intelligence-ai-coined-dartmouth
06:39 This is Vilija’s work performed at Leiden University, see above for link
07:00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method
08:02 The Unified Kill Chain (UKC) framework – Paul Pols: https://www.unifiedkillchain.com/assets/The-Unified-Kill-Chain.pdf (PDF)
08:18 https://xkcd.com/538/
14:10 https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/
14:16 Stochastic Parrot: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
15:55 https://www.weforum.org/press/2023/01/geopolitical-instability-raises-threat-of-catastrophic-cyberattack-in-next-two-years/
17:00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell
17:33 MITRE ATT&CK: https://attack.mitre.org/
Lockheed Martin Cyber Kill Chain: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/cyber/cyber-kill-chain.html
21:05 AI-based or at least -supported MDR is a massive field for information security startups. Full disclosure: John is invested in several of these, so to avoid conflicts of interest we won’t name any
26:50 Sometimes it got pretty extreme, e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ – and let’s not mention Grok’s recent MechaHitler meltdown: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-praised-hitler-antisemitism-x-ntwnfb
30:06 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
32:50 Ed Zitron recently published an interesting article on the low economic viability of many current AI systems, which is conceivably also an issue: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
34:42 EU AI Act: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng

Some additional supporting links:

Encode Europe: https://encodeai.eu/who-we-are/
Encode The Netherlands (the NL-focused entity): https://www.linkedin.com/company/encode-nl/
Women4Cyber The Netherlands: https://www.linkedin.com/company/women4cyber-thenetherlands
Women4Cyber’s international website: https://women4cyber.eu

Vilija Vainaite on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vainaitev

As always, we haven’t read all of these in their entirety, and the Wikipedia links are provided as-is, and only meant as a starting point for someone interested in more than just casual information.

You can find CyAN’s Secure-in-Mind YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@cybersecadvisors.

All of our episodes are also available in audio format on Apple iTunes, Amazon Audible, Podcast Republic, Spotify, and Libsyn – links on our Media page.