DOD Cyber Crime Center official warns industry about AI-boosted cyberattack ‘kill chain’

Terry Kalka, director of the DOD-Defense Industrial Base Collaborative Information Sharing Environment (DCISE), warned that AI is accelerating both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks against defense contractors at the Elastic Public Sector Summit on Thursday. Kalka described how malicious actors can now use AI to automate entire attack sequences—from identifying vulnerabilities in a target organization to prioritizing exploits and extracting usable data—without human intervention between steps. The DCISE, which has supported about 1,300 defense industrial base partners since 2008, oversees vulnerability disclosure and incident reporting for the defense sector. Kalka urged companies to conduct red-team assessments of their own vulnerabilities, particularly public-facing systems, and noted that cyberattacks can cost companies millions of dollars. The DOD Cyber Crime Center also runs a white-hat hacker program to proactively identify vulnerabilities on contractors' digital assets before attackers can exploit them.