While artificial intelligence has been touted as a way to improve cyber security, it is also being used by cyber criminals in their attacks. The threats are described in a report issued by Europol and the United Nations.
Deepfakes are the most talked about malicious use of AI, but there are others:
- Compromise or sabotage of AI systems for voice recognition and malware detection.
- Automatically identify high value systems and data in a network.
- High speed ransomware attacks to cripple networks before they can react.
- Tags on phishing emails so scammers can tell what attacks are more likely to succeed.
As this report shows, whether AI is a help or a threat to cyber security depends on who is using it.