AI-Generated Malware and Cybersecurity

This blog post dives into the dangerous waters of AI-generated malware, lurking like an eel to steal your precious data and destroy your computer. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, its applications in various fields grow more sophisticated, and unfortunately, this includes the realm of cybercrime. 

What Is Malware? 

Malicious software (malware) is like an infection. It gets into your computer through infected files you download or through corrupted websites. It can steal your data and destroy your computer system. These things are legitimately feared scams! 

But there are systems to protect me, right? 

Yes and no. Many companies create security solutions against malware. However, it is often only in the hands of users not to click on a suspicious link, or not to download a video from a person they haven’t seen in years. 

AI in the Game 

We can follow all the rules; we can keep all the systems up to date, be super careful when opening e-mail attachments, and pay for the best malware protection software. But anyone can get fooled when dealing with a new threat that is becoming more and more powerful; AI-generated malware. 

It’s smart, adaptable, and fast. 

Generative AI (GenAI) was created to revolutionize content creation. It can learn and adapt without interference. This is often used for harmless causes – you can create texts with ChatGPT or images with DALL·E. But in the world of cyberattacks, ChatGPT can be misused to create malware.  

What advantages does AI bring to attackers? 

GenAI is not helping cybersecurity-focused developers to sleep particularly easily. There are more than a few serious advantages it brings to criminals. Here are some examples: 

• Simulated human-like conversations: Since systems like ChatGPT can simulate human-like conversations, they can easily fool people to click on malicious links. Deepfake videos have also already outsmarted many people. 
• Vulnerability Scanning: AI can scan and find vulnerabilities in systems and use this knowledge to highjack your computer. 
• Spear Phishing: Criminals use AI to gather and analyze large amounts of sensitive data from social media and other sources to create targeted and convincing spear-phishing attacks. 
• Adaptive Tactics: It can adapt its tactics in real-time during an attack, learning from the defenses it encounters to increase its effectiveness. 
• Automated Code Generation: We shouldn’t forget that AI can also generate code. This enables cybercriminals to launch multiple attacks with different characteristics at the same time. 
• Password Cracking: AI can quickly crack passwords by analyzing patterns and employing sophisticated algorithms. 

AI Against AI 

The irony in our new AI world is that we can use AI to protect ourselves against AI. It sounds like a riddle, doesn’t it? 

The calming truth is – it’s not just attackers who are attracted to AI capabilities. 

Cybersecurity companies are developing more and more innovative solutions to use AI in security management. They use them to detect malware (regardless of whether it was created by a human or an AI), exploit vulnerabilities, scan code, or detect anomalies – all of this creates a powerful weapon in the war against cybercriminals. 

Protect Yourselves 

But the most important part of being protected against malware lies in your hands. Well, rather, in your brain. Keep

in mind that the attacks are becoming more powerful. So, we need to be more careful what we click on. 

Author: Kristýna Supradnyan

picture: “AI-Generated Malware” by Pixlr (https://pixlr.com/image-generator/)