White hat hacker AI bots prepare for DARPA’s DEF CON cyber brawl

The research wing of the US military has picked the seven teams who will compete to build machine-learning software that can find and patch bugs automatically to fend off hackers.

The DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge will be held at the DEF CON hacking conference next month. The agency has put up $2m in prize money in the unlikely event of a team building a system that can not only find flaws but write its own patches and deploy them without crashing.