We recently visited Giovanni Vigna in the glory of Santa Barbara’s sun and coastline. His students are lucky to have such a setting to learn about malware analysis, vulnerability analysis and other areas of artificial intelligence and even more lucky to have him as their professor at University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is also the director of NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION)

Gary and Giovanni traded stories which sounded like the good old days, but then we got serious in talking through the new, uncharted territory of machine learning security.  We discussed what’s to be explored with emergent behavior in this “Agentic AI” phase and more.

Giovanni is also the founder of Shellphish which, apparently, has participated in more DEF CON CTF competitions than any other team in the world and an advisor to Artiphishell. Very cool.