How Lenin Alevski Built a Cybersecurity Survival Game in a Week and Got 12,000 Players

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing podcast, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts, and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer.

Gianna Whitver (0:28)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing. I'm your host, Gianna Whitver, and today we have a very special guest. We have Lenin Alevski.

He is an AI Security Engineer at Google, and he is the creator of the Accidental CISO game. Lenin, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Lenin Alevski (0:53)

Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.

We've been talking in the last few months about doing this, and I'm very glad we're finally doing the podcast. As you mentioned, I currently work for Google, doing some AI and security in there, but in my free time, I'm an open-source contributor, and one of those contributions was this funny game that I've been receiving a lot of good comments about it, and it was crazy during DEFCON, people will reach out to me about talking about the game. I'm very excited to talk more about that.

Gianna Whitver (1:21)

I am so excited to talk about this game, too. Before we do that, though, tell us a little bit about what does an AI security engineer do at Google?

Lenin Alevski (1:29)

Yeah, so pretty much, I think in the last couple of two years, the whole industry has aligned into integrating these very powerful AI systems or artificial intelligence systems into all of our existing products. This is not true only about Google, but many companies in the industry. Basically, the challenge now is how to do that in a secure and safe way, right? How do we build these integrations in a way that they provide the best experiences in terms of software and also they are secure?

I can go into the technical, but basically it's doing threat modeling now against autonomous AI systems and machine learning models, everything that has to do with artificial intelligence. That will be a high level response for that.

Gianna Whitver (2:14)

There's a lot of talk right now, the autonomous escapes of various models from contained environments to hack various companies that they should not have been allowed to do. Is that something that is an actual concern that you're thinking about too, or is that like overblown sort of hype in the industry?

Lenin Alevski (2:35)

Yes, I can give you one answer from my personal perspective, and it's from a security engineer perspective, of course. You need to think in terms of risk. You need to balance always capability, functionality versus risk. So, container escapes and AI models gone rogue are a real risk that we're seeing in the industry. There is a couple of very high-profile cases, like the OpenAI case and so others, and they are very well-documented. They just give a talk at Black Hat where they describe the whole post-mortem of everything that happens. Yeah, if you want to get in the cybersecurity space, now is almost as a prerequisite to think about how these powerful systems, these AI systems, can do bad things or they do things that are not intended to.

I will say it's very real. It's happening and we're working towards building safer and more secure systems.

Gianna Whitver (3:31)

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Awesome. As we all are in this industry, I would think too from the vendor side of the house. So this is great. You were just at DEF CON this year. Can you tell us also, because a lot of the marketers listening, never get an opportunity to go to DEF CON. Before we get into the Accidental CISO game, what was your experience at DEF CON this year? What was some of your favorite parts that you saw, talks or attended or participated in?