Jennifer Victoria Scurrell is a PhD candidate at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on human-AI interaction, AI-supported influence operations (information operations), and responsible AI. With a strong background in social and political sciences, her work emphasizes the human-centric and ethical implementation of AI. In this expert interview, Jennifer shares her insights on the role of AI in the future of cybersecurity.
How do you perceive the role of AI in the future of cybersecurity defense mechanisms?
AI will play a pivotal role in enhancing cybersecurity, offering advanced capabilities for proactive threat detection and response in automated and scaled-up ways. AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and recognize subtle patterns will enable the identification of complex threats, including potential misuse of systems. One of the challenges is to maintain a balance between automation and ethical oversight to prevent misuse, such as unwanted surveillance or biased threat detection. Effective human-AI symbiosis—combining AI’s data processing power with human ethical judgment and oversight, and beyond—will be vital to ensure responsible and effective cybersecurity defenses.
What are the ethical implications of using AI in cybersecurity, and how should organizations address them?
The use of AI in cybersecurity naturally opens-up ethical questions such as biases, privacy violations, and excessive monitoring. To mitigate these risks, organizations must prioritize transparency, implement fairness checks, and use privacy-preserving methods. Human oversight remains essential to enforce accountability and protect individual rights from AI-driven decisions. In the coming years, symbiotic human-AI interaction frameworks are expected to take over many of these oversight responsibilities, fostering a more integrated approach to responsible AI governance.
How do you balance the potential of AI in cybersecurity with the risks it introduces?
Balancing AI’s potential requires robust risk management, including ethical considerations, transparency, and human control. Addressing risks such as biases and adversarial manipulation whose mitigation would involve continuous testing, explainable AI, and human-in-the-loop approaches to ensure AI supports security without undermining it. In the future, human-in-the loop systems will likely be replaced by symbiotic human-AI support structures, offering even more precise and scalable threat assessment procedures.
How can organizations stay ahead of AI-powered cyber threats?
To stay ahead of AI-powered threats, organizations should leverage AI for advanced pattern detection, automated threat analysis, and predictions of attack vectors. A shift from a human-in-the-loop approach to an interactive human-AI symbiosis will likely result in faster, more scalable, and precise decision-making.
Collaborations to share threat intelligence, combined with regular red teaming exercises, will likely be crucial for identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring a system’s resilience against adversarial attacks. Working with diverse and plural red teams, both internal and external, as well as both, human and synthetic, will likely further strengthen security strategies by incorporating different perspectives and leveraging the strengths of human-AI collaborations.
How do you see AI transforming the role of cybersecurity professionals in the next decade?
AI will transform cybersecurity roles from manual threat response to strategic oversight, emphasizing the need for an interactive human-AI symbiosis. In this future model, professionals will increasingly focus on guiding AI, ethical auditing, and leveraging AI’s capabilities to enhance security decision-making—making it faster, more scalable, and precise. Human expertise will remain essential to address complex, nuanced challenges, while AI will enhance scalability and efficiency, fostering a collaborative and responsible approach to cybersecurity.
