In Google’s sleek Singapore office at Block 80, Level 3, Mark Johnston stood before a room of technology journalists at 1:30 PM with a startling admission: after five decades of cybersecurity evolution, defenders are still losing the war. “In 69% of incidents in Japan and Asia Pacific, organisations were notified of their own breaches by external entities,” the Director of Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO for Asia Pacific revealed, his presentation slide showing a damning statistic – most companies can’t even detect when they’ve been breached.
What unfolded during the hour-long “Cybersecurity in the AI Era” roundtable was an honest assessment of how Google Cloud AI technologies are attempting to reverse decades of defensive failures, even as the same artificial intelligence tools empower attackers with unprecedented capabilities.
The historical context: 50 years of defensive failure
The crisis isn’t new. Johnston traced the problem back to cybersecurity pioneer James P. Anderson’s 1972 observation that “systems that we use really don’t protect themselves” – a challenge that has persisted despite decades of technological advancement. “What James P Anderson said back in 1972 still applies today,” Johnston said, highlighting how fundamental security problems remain unsolved even as technology evolves.
The persistence of basic vulnerabilities compounds this challenge. Google Cloud’s threat intelligence data reveals that “over 76% of breaches start with the basic