Security leaders worry about generative AI risks
A new survey of 300 senior cybersecurity stakeholders finds that 98 percent are concerned about the cybersecurity risks posed by ChatGPT, Google Bard, WormGPT, and similar tools.
The report from Abnormal Security shows the main worry is the increased sophistication of email attacks that generative AI will make possible -- particularly, the fact that generative AI will help attackers craft highly specific and personalized email attacks based on publicly available information.
Indeed these attacks are already happening, 80.3 percent of respondents confirm that their organizations have either already received AI-generated email attacks or strongly suspect this to be the case.
"Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, bringing efficiencies to individuals and businesses like we've never seen before. But, like everyone else, cybercriminals are also taking advantage of this technology," says Evan Reiser, Abnormal CEO and co-founder. "Threat actors can use these tools to scale email attacks in volume and sophistication, eliminating the tell tale signs of an attack like typos and grammatical errors, while applying personalized context, tone, and language to make them even more deceptive. As generative AI lowers the barrier to entry for launching advanced attacks, we are entering a new and increasingly dangerous era of cybercrime, where organizations will need to rely on good AI to fight bad AI."
The majority of respondents are still relying on their cloud email providers or legacy tools for email security, with 53 percent of respondents still using secure email gateways to protect their email environments. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t seem to be working, as 46 percent lack confidence in traditional solutions to detect and block AI-generated attacks.
As well as being a threat, AI is also seen as part of the solution, 92 percent of survey participants see the value in using AI to defend against AI-generated email threats. Also more than 94 percent of survey participants say that AI will have a major impact on their cybersecurity strategy over the next two years.
The full report is available from the Abnormal site.
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