From the source
Microsoft Research published a podcast conversation in which research manager Mike Walker describes how hacker culture led him to a career in cyber defense.
- Walker, who leads projects at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity and large distributed systems, previously led DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, the program that demonstrated autonomous AI systems finding and patching software vulnerabilities.
- He says the program marked its 10th anniversary this year in 2026.
- In the discussion with principal technical program manager Weishung Liu, Walker argues that effective security depends on understanding trust and context, saying that every time a security system asks something of users it is asking for their trust, and that squandering that trust makes the security regime fall down.
- He also reflects on what competitive hacking taught him about teamwork and collective intelligence, and asks whether today's networked systems are any safer than they were a decade ago.
