The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (GenAI), has revolutionized organizational landscapes and transformed both the cyber threat landscape and cybersecurity.
As organizations handle increasing amounts of data daily, AI offers advanced capabilities that would be harder to achieve with traditional methods.
According to the “best practices” report recently published by Spain’s National Cryptology Centre (NCC), when applied to cybersecurity, AI can:
Besides helping security teams perform these tasks more accurately, AI also helps them improve their working speed.
But speed is also what cybercriminals are achieving when harnessing the power of AI: it allows them to quickly adapt their attacks to new security measures.
According to the NCC, the use of AI in cybersecurity comes with the challenges and limitations:
Finally, GenAI, which can be used by security practitioners to enhance their system testing processes, can also be leveraged by cybercriminals to generate malware variants, deepfakes, fake websites and convincing phishing emails.
With AI technology continuously improving, cybercriminals will surely find new ways to compromise systems.
Last October, President Biden issued an Executive Order with the intention to manage the risks and guarantee safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.
Soon after, the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published security guidelines for developers and providers of AI-powered systems to ensure secure AI system development and deployment.