INTERPOL's Security Chief Says AI Defense Starts With One Question

INTERPOL’s global chief information security officer, Bjorn R. Watne, has urged companies to identify their “crown jewels” first as artificial intelligence (AI) increases the speed and scale of scams and fraud.

Watne made the remarks to CNBC at Tech Week Singapore on Thursday. He said AI mainly helps criminals run familiar tactics faster and at a larger scale.

How INTERPOL Wants Companies to Rank Their AI Cyber Risks

Scam operators can use AI to target several victims at once, Watne said. Better translation and digital identities also make fraudulent contacts harder to tell apart from genuine ones.

Businesses should first identify the assets their operations depend on most, according to Watne. They should also work out who would most want to steal or disrupt those assets.

Companies can then study those adversaries’ tactics and technologies through threat intelligence and adjust their defenses to match.

“There is no need for everyone to try and protect against everything all at once when they’re not being targeted by it,” he said.

Watne added that opportunistic criminals and advanced persistent threat (APT) actors can require different defenses. Cyber risk is climbing corporate risk registers, he said, yet cybersecurity has not fully reached many boardrooms.

State-backed hackers are already scaling up with AI. TeamT5 found Chinese state-affiliated groups more than doubled attack volume after adopting open-source AI models.

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Watne’s Agentic AI Warning Lands as Hackers Scale Up

Agentic AI, which completes tasks for users, is a particular worry for Watne. Watne said he is particularly wary of agentic AI because these systems can act for users. 

He warned that wrong actions, especially in the physical world, could cause bodily harm. He flagged AI in cars and self-driving vehicles as a concern.

That risk of AI taking the wrong action also worries Western governments. In May, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released joint agentic AI guidance. It told organizations to assume these systems may behave unexpectedly until security standards mature.

In August, OpenAI published an open letter warning that AI-enabled attacks will become far more widespread within months. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Coinbase, and Circle are among its signatories, which numbered more than 100 at launch.

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