AI is driving countless improvements in health, product development, town planning and loads more besides – but the outlook isn’t so great for the world of cybersecurity.
In a piece rather ominously titled ‘AI makes the dark web even darker’, tech journalist Emma Zaballos outlined just some of the daunting ways that machine learning could be used to bypass data protections and drive up both the volume and effectiveness of common cyber attacks.
She notes how AI is quickly becoming “a powerful weapon in the arsenal of cybercriminals” and is accelerating threats such as phishing and social engineering.
Much has been said about how AI could actually be used for good in the cybercrime world, to develop and deploy next-generation protection that will make it more difficult than ever for criminals to get their hands on sensitive data.
However, Zaballos claims those exact tools and techniques are already being used by potential hackers now – to roll out very familiar attacks, but at unprecedented speeds.
AI is taking existing threats and “making them faster, more widespread, and harder to stop”, she writes.
For phishing scams in particular, cybercriminals would previously have to write convincing fake messages themselves. Often these were filled with factual inaccuracies or spelling errors – all red flags to make would-be targets suspicious.
Today, however, AI can be used to generate vast swathes of well-written, persuasive and personalised messages able to evade suspicion with ease.
There’s also grave concern in the world of malware. Existing protections operate through detection of common patterns and behaviours, so that anti-malware tools can effectively pinpoint what is dangerous and what is safe. AI could be used to bypass these protections at pace, with malware being designed that is capable of changing its behaviour and creating new iterations that are just different enough to avoid detection.
Outlining her concerns – and why they should be heeded by businesses large and small, Zaballos wrote: “This acceleration applies to every type of cyberattack. What once took criminals days now takes hours. What once targeted hundreds now targets millions.
“AI has the potential to make everything faster and bigger.”
