Rise of Artificial Intelligence poses challenges to Cybersecurity

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Criminals have been early adopters, with Zscaler citing AI as a factor in the 47 percent surge in phishing attacks it saw last year. Crooks are automating more personalized texts and scripted voice recordings while dodging alarms by going through such unmonitored channels as encrypted WhatsApp messages on personal cellphones. Translations to the target language are getting better, and disinformation is harder to spot, security researchers said.
  • That is just the beginning, experts, executives and government officials fear, as attackers use artificial intelligence to write software that can break into corporate networks in novel ways, change appearance and functionality to beat detection, and smuggle data back out through processes that appear normal.
  • “It is going to help rewrite code,” National Security Agency cybersecurity chief Rob Joyce warned the conference. “Adversaries who put in work now will outperform those who don’t.”
  • The result will be more believable scams, smarter selection of insiders positioned to make mistakes, and growth in account takeovers and phishing as a service, where criminals hire specialists skilled at AI.
  • Those pros will use the tools for “automating, correlating, pulling in information on employees who are more likely to be victimized,” said Deepen Desai, Zscaler’s chief information security officer and head of research.
  • AI will help defenders as well, scanning reams of network traffic logs for anomalies, making routine programming tasks much faster, and seeking out known and unknown vulnerabilities that need to be patched, experts said in interviews.
  • Some companies have added AI tools to their defensive products or released them for others to use freely. Microsoft, which was the first big company to release a chat-based AI for the public, announced Microsoft Security Copilot in March. It said users could ask questions of the service about attacks picked up by Microsoft’s collection of trillions of daily signals as well as outside threat intelligence.

Read the original article by clicking here.