Emerging technologies: A catalyst to cyber crimes

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and other emerging technologies are advancing industries. The technological developments are taking us towards a new future. Google, Apple and Facebook, name any organization, almost everyone either using AI or planning to implement soon. But what about cyber security? Is Artificial Intelligence would enhance security or become a threat?

On one hand, emerging technologies like AI benefiting the cyber security space heling security experts to analyze, study, and understand cyber crime. On the other hand, AI can serve as a weapon for cyber criminals as the security landscape continues to evolve, hackers are moving towards detection evasion techniques to hide from security solutions.

CiOL spoke to security experts to understand whether AI and ML kind of emerging technologies increase the cybercrime?

We spoke to Jyoti Prakash, Country Director – Enterprise Security Business, Micro Focus India, asking what he thinks about the emerging technologies in terms of cyber security.

As we are going ahead with the fast-paced digital environment, we will witness a drastic rise in data volume – this will further lead to a requirement for a strong cyber breach defense framework.

We need to implement a holistic security framework to identify, protect, detect, respond and recover from cybersecurity threats - AI & Analytics can help only if it is implemented in the right manner.

Acquiring data from historical threads and Baselining the same is of utmost importance, in order to detect threats properly and efficiently. This will in turn, help reduce millions of threat incidences into limited “Threat leads” and AI framework will play a critical role here.

Hence, it is imperative for enterprises to adopt immersive technologies like AI & ML to prevent cyber-attacks. In fact, in 2020, AI will be inescapable for organizations. Going forward, AI will be used extensively for fraud detection and humans can have some free time to innovate and focus on more strategic tasks. That time is near when at least one company will come forward and talk about how AI helped in threat detection.

Prashant Gupta, Head of solutions South East Asia & INDIA, Verizon Business Group, talked about his vision about the increasing cyber crimes and the impact of emerging technologies.

We are living in a connected world and the fourth industrial revolution will bring in a lot of automation. Given this, security will become even more critical. There is extensive research being done to create a safe world. Lately, many OEMs have started integrating AI and ML to make systems more efficient and real-time.

The effectiveness of cyber crimes in 2020 has two sides to it. While AL and ML will be misused for targeted attacks and cybercrime, Deepfake is a recent example, wherein criminals employed AI-based software to replicate a CEO's voice to authorize a cash transfer of $243,000.

On the other side, AI will also be used as a weapon of defense as it improves visibility and is very efficient in profiling. In the past, AI has shown some great results in detecting anomalies in traffic patterns and modeling user behavior as it brings in faster decision-making capabilities.

We are also seeing use of AI in automating the offensive side in Cybersecurity, govts are seeing the great case in use of AI in prevention and offensive countermeasures.

Akshat Jain, CTO and Cofounder, Cyware Labs, thinks to build stronger security solutions to fight against the modern threats.

As the security landscape continues to evolve, hackers are moving towards detection evasion techniques to hide from security solutions. The introduction of AI in threat intelligence and detection technologies is needed to make it stronger because it will make a significant difference in how we handle threat intel against these sophisticated threats.

Luis Corrons, Avast Security Evangelist, agrees to the increasing risks of emerging technologies.

Yes, AI is increasingly used in all kind of fields. For example, in the coming year, we predict that cybercriminals will begin using adversarial AI to prepare and send emails with malicious or phishing content or attachments.

Emails are already the number one mechanism to spread malware, but we expect the methods used to send them will become more sophisticated, in general.