One of the first malicious generative AI tools closed down not with a bang or a whimper, but a warning.
Even where models aren’t explicitly designed for nefarious purposes, AI safety firm founder Harriet Farlow says they can be deceived into doing harm, disrupted or fooled into disclosing information they shouldn’t. “ multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching said in remarks reported by broadcasters RTHK and CNN.
Microsoft’s research has found it takes an average of 72 minutes for a hacker to go from gaining entry to a target’s computers through a malicious link to accessing corporate data. From there, it isn’t far to the consequences of major ransomware attacks such as Optus and Medibank in the last year:. “If you think of a threat analyst or your cyber responder, you’re looking through hundreds of lines of logs every single day and you need to find that anomaly,” Bucchianeri says.
He says it is clear that AI is a tool that is equally powerful for both attackers and defenders. “We must ensure that as defenders, we exploit its full potential in the asymmetric battle that is cybersecurity.”