We live in a wonderful time of convenient access to information. In almost every workflow, we are seeing AI streamline, optimise, and in a lot of cases even automate the entire pipeline negating the need for human interaction or oversight, allowing our minds to be more creative and focus on progessing humanity forwards.
Today, we wanted to focus on a lesser known evil of A.I., one that can impact our professional career and perhaps most importantly, our opinions on the world. As many of you are surely aware, A.I tools act like a summary tool, pooling millions of data points scientific journals, opinion pieces, and blogs and packaging it nicely into an easy to digest paragraph or three for you to interpret. Tools like Google’s Gemini and Open AI’s ChatGPT are examples of such tools that are used by hundreds of millions of people per day.
What you may not be aware of is the inherit security risk and manipulation to your facts and figures that exist by utilising these tools. Recent reports have confirmed that malicious actors are intentionally injecting harmful code into public websites and social media platforms. These poisoned inputs are then scraped by large language models (LLMs), which unknowingly regurgitate them in A.I. generated responses. The result? Responses that looks legitimate but contains hidden malware, sometimes invisible until it’s too late.
Threat to SMBs
Small and medium businesses are particularly vulnerable as the majority of these businesses do not yet have the right tools deployed to protect their users from unknowingly causing intrusion via these new means of attack vector.
Four actions SMBs can take today:
- Provide your team with A.I. tools: This may seem counterproductive; provide your teams with A.I. tools that you have researched and approved to be used within your business, and allow you to control the flow of data.
- Never Trust – always verify: Treat A.I. generated content as untrusted by default, and make use of sandboxed, secure environments when dealing with private company and/or client data. If you are actively developing new features and functionality within your existing platforms (i.e. CRMs, etc),
- Upskill and educate your team: Like any sports team, the weakest player can throw the match. Continue to train and upskill your teams so that they can lead by example and remain secure.
- Strip formatting from responses: At the very least, educate your team to first cleanse A.I. generated responses by copying any text into a pain text file (such as in Notepad or similar), and then manipulate it from there. This will make any hidden code very obvious.
Bonus Tip: A general rule of thumb that B.TECH employees have adopted is to create content and ideas first, and then use A.I. to provide a familiar format for our readers (and to clean up any grammar or typos along the way). This ensures that your original ideas and structure remains for full effect, whilst allowing the efficiencies to be beneficial as a business.
AI is increasingly weaponized by cybercriminals to automate attacks, enhance phishing schemes, and create adaptive malware, making cyber threats more sophisticated and difficult to detect.
Key Uses of AI in Cyber Attacks
- Attack Automation: AI enables cybercriminals to automate various phases of an attack, from reconnaissance to execution. This allows for faster and more efficient attacks, reducing the need for human intervention.
- Enhanced Phishing Attacks: AI tools can generate highly personalized and convincing phishing emails, known as spear-phishing. By analyzing social media profiles and past interactions, attackers can craft messages that appear legitimate, increasing the likelihood of success.
- Malware Development: AI is used to create more resilient and adaptive malware. Unlike traditional malware, AI-powered variants can learn from their environment and alter their behavior to evade detection. This includes using polymorphism to frequently change their code, making them harder to identify by security systems.
- Data Scraping and Customization: Cybercriminals leverage AI for data scraping, gathering information from public sources to tailor their attacks. This customization makes their strategies more effective and harder to defend against.
- Exploiting AI Systems: Attackers can manipulate AI systems deployed by organizations, finding limitations in machine learning models and exploiting them for malicious purposes. This includes generating a higher volume of attacks or creating new exploits.
Implications for Cybersecurity
The rise of AI in cyber attacks poses significant challenges for cybersecurity professionals. As AI technology becomes more accessible, the volume and sophistication of attacks are expected to increase. Organizations must enhance their defenses against AI-driven threats, including training staff to recognize advanced phishing attempts and investing in AI-powered security solutions to detect and respond to these evolving threats.
Tech Business News
In summary, AI is transforming the landscape of cyber attacks, enabling cybercriminals to execute more sophisticated, large-scale, and targeted attacks, which necessitates a proactive and adaptive approach to cybersecurity.