The AI Arms Race: Risk and Reward on Both Sides of the Battlefield

​Picture the scenario. Your home address, national insurance number and bank details have been stolen by hackers, and now they’re asking you to negotiate directly to get them back. 

It’s a terrifying idea, but this is the situation more than 100,000 staff at the BBC, British Airways and Boots now find themselves in after hacker group Clop exploited a weakness in third-party payroll software to access the data of potentially hundreds of companies. 

What’s even scarier is that this is not an isolated incident. During the first half of 2023 there were an estimated 1,248 damaging cyber-attacks per week affecting businesses around the world. The hackers are getting more sophisticated, advanced, and in many cases, brazen about their assaults, and apparently no one is safe. Even NASA, the seat of some of the brightest scientific and technical minds in America, revealed a flaw in their website this week that could have tricked users into visiting malicious sites by disguising a dangerous URL with NASA’s name.

Key developments have also revealed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used as a fundamental element of several high-profile attacks. This new wave of strikes is harnessing “offensive AI”which takes all the main features of open-source systems to enable cybercriminals to undertake targeted attacks at an unprecedented speed and scale. An important feature of these new threats is that they often fly under the radar of standard, rule-based detection tools, so are effective at evading discovery and are severely damaging as a result. Major businesses around the world have already fallen victim to AI-supported cyber-attacks, including the famous NotPetya and BlackEnergy malware incidents. Often used in deepfake and malware attacks, AI use is also driving an increase in incidents across the cyber hacking landscape. In fact, one tech security firm, Zscaler, recently commented that AI has been a significant driver in the 47% surge in phishing attacks they experienced last year. 

With offensive AI not simply “on the horizon” anymore, all organisations will need to evolve their defences to combat the new wave of threats. The “AI arms race” is well and truly underway.

In this insightful article, Trident Search explores the risks and rewards of using AI. Read the full article by clicking the link below.