November 6, 2024

Offensive Cyber Security and AI; The Threats and The Cure

by ameliarich

With advancement in technology over the last couple of decades, there has been a simultaneous advancement in offensive cyber crimes. In Check Point’s 2023 Mid Year Report, it was revealed that there was an 8% spike in Global Cyberattacks.The cyber attacks targeted towards organizations’ data have become more sophisticated and complex and to respond to these threats organizations have been using various offensive cyber security systems to keep themselves protected.

AI As a Threat

The extent of these attacks have become more sophisticated after the introduction of AI. The attackers are leveraging AI tools and techniques to assist cyberattacks and system breaches. They use AI in different ways to cause damage to confidential data, using techniques like:

Phishing

Phishing is a technique of luring a user through a fake email or message that looks real. These messages are usually generated by hackers making them look genuine or official messages coming from a reputable company. It is mainly done to get user’s personal information like passwords or pincodes.

AI has made phishing look even more real. Initially phishing emails and messages were identified by their poor english like grammatical errors and bad phrasing. But with AI tools like chatgpt and various chatbots, hackers are now enjoying the perks of AI generated content. These tools make fabricated messages sound highly professional, which can easily deceive any receiver.

Impersonation

Attackers are also using people’s emotions and care for their loved ones as a bait to cause damage to them. They are using AI to impersonate someone that the victims know or care about, to trap them. More specifically to make money out of their innocence. Various AI tools and chatbots are used to generate fake voice messages or calls asking for help to misguide the victims.

One of the most well-known incidents of impersonation is of an elderly couple who were deceived by a fake call pretending to be their grandson, who asked for money because he was in trouble. The easiest target for these attackers are someone with almost no knowledge about these trends and techniques.

Deep-fakes

Deep-fakes have become a common yet still an alarming threat to the common people and the large organizations. Hackers create convincing yet fake videos of a person with the help of AI tools. These videos use an actual person’s face and voice to make it extremely convincing so they can gain something on the actual person’s behalf.

Deep-fakes, today, are also being used largely for political purposes to create confusions, chaos or even to make an individual or political figure look bad in the eyes of the public.

Need for offensive cyber security

According to a recent report by Euro News in May 2024, it is reported that individuals lose $318 billion (€295 billion) every year to cybercrime, mostly due to fake generated audios and videos of impersonations and deep fakes. Moreover, a 2023 report by Cybersecurity Ventures also predicts that by 2025, the cost of cyber attacks will exceed $10 trillion (€9.3 trillion).

Thus, keeping all this in view it has become their need rather than a choice for organizations, to keep themselves protected from such breaches and attacks with the help of various offensive cyber security systems.

AI As a Cure

In medicine, the vaccination for almost every virus is created using the inactive or weakened version of the same virus or bacteria. Similarly, the AI generated cybercrimes can also be fought using AI offensive cyber security. Now to address these issues and to keep organizations data safe almost every established or developing business hires an offensive security company which provides protection services against such hackers.

These offensive security providers use AI tools to address these threats in a number of ways. In simpler language AI can work in following ways to solve an alarming situation:

Anomaly Detection

AI has powerful tools that can detect phishing messages or even deep fake audios and videos. Other than that, Machine learning enables Anomaly detection in which systems learn algorithms and expect everything to work according to the fed data. However, in case something goes off the predicted direction or it detects any abnormal behavior, AI identifies it as a threat and takes notice of it.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

GANs are one of the very powerful generative tools used by offensive security companies to fight unwanted attackers. This deep learning method works on two neural networks; generative network and detective network. Former creates new data and samples that are close to real ones and the latter distinguishes between the fake and the real data.

Automated Response

Offensive security providers have systems that are also trained to respond to threatening situations automatically. As there is a threat detected, the system prepares itself to respond to fake ids, messages or videos by identifying or blocking their IP address.

Why Prefer AI Offensive Cyber Security?

With advancement in AI attacks many offensive security companies now prefer AI cyber security systems to reciprocate the threat. And they have many good reasons to do that:

Conclusion

All in all, in this new era, offensive security providers prefer AI generated security systems to fight AI generated threats. The ability of AI to use machine learning as well as deep learning gives it the leverage to process historical and large amounts of data efficiently and use it for protecting the organization against potential threats with the use of automated response. This makes the defense system around the company’s important data more efficient and less time consuming.