Featured image above shows Ms. Bambi Escalante, country manager, Fortinet Philippines; Rashish Pandey, vice president of Marketing and Communications, Asia & Australia, New Zealand (right); and Nap Castillo, manager, Systems engineer, Fortinet Philippines. (Photo: SDN)
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Gap between Internet Threats and Scarcity of Cybersecurity Workforce Pushed Wider by AI — Fortinet
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GRAND HYATT MANILA, Taguig City (SDN) — Artificial intelligence (AI), for good or for evil, is now a mainstay in life!
Well, there’s no debate about AI’s contributions to society’s betterment, of improving daily life in many ways — big and small — of which many are not even aware off.
AI is now embedded in many new devices in the market. Device makers contribute in turning AI one of life’s constants, they compete on how to leverage the surging technology and its countless uses continue to grow. People don’t see AI literally as a material object but they use it, feel its effect on their life. All without being a tech wizard.
It automates mundane tasks, personalizes experiences, and helps solve complex problems.
AI is embedded now in navigation, travel, healthcare, safety, productivity & work, communication, transportation, police work! Name it, AI has become a powerful tool that makes like better and easy.
But AI like a coin has two sides. Unlike a coin, though, AI has good side and bad side, depending on how people use it. How we wish AI has a monopoly of good uses, but it does not work like that. It can be a power for good, it can be a power for evil!
Speaking of “evil”, think cyber bad guys, ghostly keyboard warriors, the phantoms armed with AI tools. They have been amassing hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars every year. In fact, Cybersecurity Ventures projected in November 2020 that cybercrime would costs US$10.5 trillion by 2025.
Presumably, the money would come from organizations whose network security they hacked and breached and stole valuable data from that they used for blackmail and ransom. If that’s not an evil use of AI, then cybercriminals must be angels with hoodie.
At the Accelerate APAC 2026, Philippines Edition, hosted by Fortinet Philippines on May 12 at Grand Hyatt Manila, the cybersecurity company engaged members of the media “for an insightful session with Fortinet leaders” during which they dived deep on the “evolving cybersecurity landscape, emerging technologies, and key priorities shaping the industry in the Philippines.”
The panelists for the media briefing were Ms. Bambi Escalante, country manager, Fortinet Philippines; Rashish Pandey, vice president of Marketing and Communications, Asia & Australia, New Zealand; and Nap Castillo, manager, Systems engineer, Fortinet Philippines.
Among the notable information they shared was the widening gap between cyber threats and the scarcity of cybersecurity professionals across the globe, including in the country.
If you think AI is contributing to the gap, you are correct. Surely, the gap has been there for sometime, but AI, apparently, is pushing the divide wider.
“There continues to be a gap between threats and the available cybersecurity professionals. Actually, what contributed to the gap right now is AI because organizations now are looking for cybersecurity professionals with AI security skills,” Escalante, points out.
It appears that a skilled cybersecurity workforce is not only the challenges facing organizations beleaguered by continuing and unabated attacks.
“AI, of course, is a nascent technology. So, in terms of knowledge, training, certification, we may have scarcity of that as well. So, new technologies drive the gap,” the Fortinet Philippines country manager notes.
Escalante said her company is contributing to efforts aimed at increasing the number of AI-skilled professionals by making public “our training material. We are partnering with organizations, with educational learning institutions, so that we maybe able to train as many people as possible.”
She continued that while cybercriminals are using AI tools for their criminal enterprise, there are also, from a technology angle, solutions coming from AI that can help” as being discussed in Accelerate APAC 2026. She said the AI tools which she did not identify “can also help whenever there’s scarcity of cybersecurity skills.”
At the same time, Escalante allayed fears that AI may replace humans in cybersecurity. She emphasized that “human beings will always be there in terms of judgment and oversight.”
Fielding more questions from SDN Online, Escalante explained “accountability” between cybersecurity companies and organizations that adopt a particular cybersecurity platform, especially when a breach occurs.
Timeline of hackers’ use of AI in their cyber attacks
She said organizations have three choices about how they want to initiate their security and protection from cyber threats.
First, the Fortinet Philippines official pointed out, is operate — in-house — their own cybersecurity solutions and acquire the capability for that.
Second, she pointed out, organizations will enter into a partnership with a service provider, which has a portion of their operation in-house and a portion of that is being out-sourced with a service provider.
Third setup, Escalante said, is they “will fully out-outsourced their security operations to what we call managed security service providers, with a contract.
She said that accountability for data breaches would depend on the setup organizations have implemented in their company.
Pandey said cyber $bad guys are working together, “good guys should work together.”
A minute or two of research on cyberspace showed the timeline when hackers leveraging AI tools for their illegal activities.
It was learned that cyber bad guys started using AI in 2017-2018, then initial exploitation in 2020-2022, then the introduction of ChatGPT with the Generative AI Surge in 2022-2024.
In 2025-2026, the Era of AI-Driven Attacks started to play out.
And just this month of May, researchers uncovered and first documented the first instance of AI being used to develop zero-day vulnerabilities. And this marked a new level of sophistication among cybercriminals.
Now, through AI hackers are deploying automated spear phishing, deepfakes; they stepped up malware development, and staging better reconnaissance to find security vulnerabilities as they zero-in on high-value targets.- EDD K. USMAN (√)
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Sources: University of California, Check Point Research, Cybersecurity Ventures