What can you tell us about what you're learning about threats to critical infrastructure, how to best defend against them?

Yeah.

Well, Seth took the words right out of my mouth a few minutes ago.

It is not a fair fight.

We have nation state level adversaries going up against critical infrastructure.

The big well-resourced utilities, the very small utilities, that's not fair.

One of the places we do a lot of work with is the island of Guam, the territory of Guam.

So what can you tell us about that work, what you're learning, and how it could inform some of these national efforts that are ongoing?

Absolutely.

So just a word of background.

Our, our Skyfall laboratory is a capability that allows us to take real physical hardware that exists in critical infrastructure systems, integrate it with our high-performance computing simulation environment, so we can understand effects on individual real devices, but then understand how those propagate to system-level scale.

Because we don't really care about effects on devices, we care about effects on systems.

And so we've absolutely been using that to help understand AI and the role of AI in critical infrastructure.

And I actually want to maybe take a step back and broaden the thinking on that just a little bit, because a lot of the focus has been on using AI to find vulnerabilities in software and devices, and that absolutely is something important to think about.

Yeah

They can also start with the part of energy infrastructure they don't want shut down and work backwards to see what critical systems they need to protect.

We can start with the consequence.

Say San Francisco loses power for a week.

That's our consequence.

Then we can run our models backwards and say, "What are all of the ways that we could have gotten to that consequence? This is what we think the adversary wants to achieve.

What are all the different tactics they might try to try to achieve that goal?" It really aids the defense in being able to understand and anticipate the whole universe of what the adversary might do.

And if someone understands that sequence, they can recreate it.

What a really bad day would be, let's say we're sitting in the middle of summer and electricity usage is really high.