Cybersecurity risk is distinct from other IT risk in that it has a thinking, adaptive, human opponent.
IT generally must deal with first order chaos and risk much like hurricanes in meteorology or viruses in biology: complex and dangerous – but fundamentally unthinking – threats such as failed processes, degraded parts and other natural and manageable failures.
Cybersecurity, on the other hand, must deal with second order chaos and risk: a chaotic system with threats that intelligently adapt to defenses and countermeasures much like in warfare or espionage, but also like in other less martial conflict like sales, legal battles, and soon AI-assisted adversarial domains.
Normally, we think of this as cyber attacker and incident response defender, but there are big implications for data leakage and data protection, too, that demand a multi-modal methodology in defense and where AI applications are uniquely suited to changing the game.