The greatest irony of current technology is that threat actors around the world are using artificial intelligence to more convincingly impersonate humans. That’s right, ChatGPT – a machine! – is enabling malicious activity like email phishing attacks. One might wonder what commentary Alan Turing would offer on this development.
Alan Turing and the Imitation Game
Alan Turing was an English mathematician, computer pioneer, cryptanalyst and philosopher, amongst his many skills. He proposed a simple test to determine if a machine was capable of human intelligence – the so-called Turing Test or Imitation Game. A human examiner would sit at a terminal to observe a conversation between a human and a machine via text messages. If the examiner could not tell the difference between the human and a machine, then the machine was determined to possess human-like intelligence.
The Double-Edged Sword of AI in Cybersecurity
In the cybersecurity world, the Turing Test is playing out amongst malicious actors. Remember the old days, when you could easily spot a phishing email because it was worded or spelled so badly it was obviously from another country and not from your bank? Well now, bad guys are using Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models to create email templates for phishing campaigns. If they can sound convincing enough, i.e. “human enough”, they are far less likely to set off your internal lie detector.
The good news is that this is the only semi-successful use of AI by threat actors that we’ve seen so far, though we certainly know they are experimenting wit other approaches too. The better news is that the good guys are investing far more time, creativity and money in leveraging AI to protect companies and individuals. At RedSense we’ve already employed AI in our latest offering, Compromised Credential Services 2.0, where we use AI to recognize and extract stolen credentials and financials in massive troves of acquired cyber crime data. And were working on using AI to identify malicious patterns in our traffic flow monitoring technology.
Perhaps the best news is that of the many facets of cyber security, it looks like threat intelligence will be least threatened by emerging AI technology. In fact, we expect CTI to grow in importance because of it.
