Nada Madkour and Deepika Raman will helm a 60-person group to identify emerging threats and protect California’s economy, critical infrastructure, and public networks.
CLTC researchers Nada Madkour, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Security Initiative (AISI), and Deepika Raman, Non-Resident Research Fellow, have been appointed to serve as co-chairs of the Emerging Technology subcommittee on the California Cybersecurity Task Force (CCTF), a leading cybersecurity advisory body for California state officials.
Launched in 2013 by the California Office of Emergency Service (CalOES), the CCTF provides strategic recommendations to the California Cybersecurity Integration Center, which works to reduce the likelihood and severity of cyber incidents that could damage California’s economy, critical infrastructure, or public- and private-sector computer networks.
Frontline Defense Against Next-Gen Attacks
The Emerging Technology subcommittee is responsible for identifying and assessing cybersecurity risks and opportunities associated with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, quantum computing, 5G, the “internet of things” (IoT), autonomous systems, blockchain, biotech, and other technologies, while advising on responsible policy and procurement frameworks.
Madkour and Raman are co-chairing the subcommittee with Vera Zakem, who serves as Chief Technology Innovation Officer for the State of California and is also an Executive Fellow in Applied Technology Policy at the UC Berkeley School of Information. The subcommittee has roughly 40 active members and 20 associate members, including subject-matter experts and executive representatives from federal, state, local, and tribal government, private industry, academia, and law enforcement.
Other CCTF subcommittees are focused on issues such as election security, critical infrastructure, cyber risk management, workforce development and education, and cybersecurity investment planning. “The Emerging Technology Subcommittee is one of the newer subcommittees,” Madkour says. “It brings together diverse stakeholders with expertise on relevant topics to tackle questions around AI and cybersecurity. It’s a community-based effort. We’re going to be focused on AI, but we’re excited to lean on the expertise of our members on other topics.”
Governing the Frontier of Cybersecurity
Having a dedicated group of experts working together on emerging technology is of vital importance as AI and other new tools are rapidly expanding opportunities for offensive attackers to launch cyberattacks. “Adversaries are benefiting from these AI-enabled tools to do some of their dirty work,” Raman says. “Things are happening at a much faster scale, and we’re almost seeing end-to-end automation, where AI models and agents are able to execute attacks by themselves.”
In addition to the subcommittees, the Task Force includes working groups focused on cross-disciplinary topics, including a group examining how generative AI is accelerating security risks to critical infrastructure. “That is definitely something that everyone has been thinking about, following the recent attacks on water treatment plants,” Madkour says. “The fact that this subcommittee is located within the cybersecurity task force and is thinking about interaction with all of the other emerging technologies is quite forward-looking and will help with proactive governance.”
To learn more about the California Cybersecurity Task Force, visit https://www.caloes.ca.gov/office-of-the-director/operations/homeland-security/california-cybersecurity-integration-center/cybersecurity-task-force/
