In a newly released report, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) warns that malicious actors are already leveraging artificial intelligence and that the number and impact of threats, including ransomware, will increase over the next two years.
The NCSC, part of the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency GCHQ, assessed that artificial intelligence enables relatively unskilled hackers to “perform more efficient access and control by lowering the barrier to entry for novice cybercriminals.” Information gathering operations… “Hire hackers and hacktivists. “
We’ve seen scams and cyberattacks for decades, but scammers and other cybercriminals often have trouble deceiving their victims because of poor use of grammar and spelling errors in their emails and texts, especially when attacking are used to target victims when the person is not a native speaker of the language.
Interestingly, other security researchers question how beneficial current AI technology is to cybercriminals in launching attacks. In December 2023, a study was released that found that phishing emails were equally effective regardless of whether they were written by a human or an AI chatbot.
What is clear, however, is that it has become almost trivial with publicly available artificial intelligence tools that can generate not only believable text, but also convincing images, audio, and even deepfake videos that can be used to deceive targets.
Additionally, the NCSC report titled “The Near-term Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Cyber Threats” warns that malicious hackers can use the technology to identify high-value data for inspection and exfiltration, thereby maximizing the impact of security breaches.
Chillingly, the NCSC warns that by 2025, it believes “generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) will make it difficult for everyone, regardless of their cybersecurity understanding, to assess email or password reuse.” determine whether a request is genuine, or identify phishing, spoofing, or social engineering attempts.”
Frankly, it’s scary.
In case you haven’t noticed, 2025 is less than a year away.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad news when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence can also make an organization’s security more resilient by improving detection of threats such as malicious emails and phishing campaigns, ultimately making them easier to deal with.
Like many technological advancements, artificial intelligence can be used for good or bad.
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this guest author article are those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the views of Tripwire.
