For the third quarter in a row, Gartner found that cyberattacks using artificial intelligence pose the greatest risk to businesses.
The consultancy surveyed 286 senior risk and insurance executives from July to September, and 80% of them cited AI-enhanced malicious attacks as the top threat they were concerned about. This is not surprising, as evidence suggests that AI-assisted attacks are on the rise.
Other frequently cited emerging risks described in the report include AI-assisted disinformation, growing political polarization, and misaligned organizational talent profiles.
Attackers use AI to write malware, create phishing emails, and more.
In June, HP intercepted an email campaign spreading malware using a script that “It was very likely that it was written with the help of GenAI.” The VBScript was perfectly structured and each command had a comment, which would be wasted effort for a human to write.
The researchers then used GenAI to produce a script and found a similar result, suggesting that the original malware was at least partially AI-generated.
SEE: 20% of generative AI jailbreak attacks succeed
The number of business email compromise attacks detected by security firm Vipre in the second quarter were 20% higher than the same period in 2023, and two-fifths of them were generated by AI. The main targets were CEOs, followed by HR and IT staff.
Usman Choudhary, VIPRE Chief Product and Technology Officer, said in the press release: “Criminalists are now leveraging sophisticated AI algorithms to create convincing phishing emails, mimicking the tone and style of legitimate communications.”
Retail sites alone experienced an average of 569,884 AI-based attacks every day from April to September, according to Imperva Threat Research. Researchers said tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, as well as special bots that scrape websites for LLM training data, are used to carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks and logic abuse. profession, for example.
More ethical hackers also admit to using GenAI, with the proportion increasing from 64% to 77% last yearaccording to a report from BugCrowd. These researchers claim that it facilitates channel attacks, fault injection attacks, and automation of parallelized attacks to breach multiple devices simultaneously. But if the “good guys” find AI useful, so will the bad actors.
The increase in these attacks should come as no surprise
AI can lowering the barrier to entry for cybercrimeas less skilled criminals can use it to generate deepfakes, scan networks for entry points, reconnaissance, etc. Researchers from ETH Zurich recently created a model that could solve Google reCAPTCHAv2 puzzles used to distinguish humans and robots 100% of the time.
Analysts at security firm Radware predicted earlier this year that this new accessibility would lead to development of private GPT models used for nefarious purposes. They also predict that the number of zero day exploits And deepfake scams would increase as malicious actors gain greater control over LLMs and generative adversarial networks.
Indeed, Google’s Mandiant tracked a total of 97 zero-day vulnerabilities that were discovered and exploited in 2023, marking a 56% increase a year earlier. Last month, Microsoft listed deepfakes among the most important types of attacks used by increasingly prolific ransomware groups.
SEE: AI Deepfakes Pose Growing Risk for Organizations in Asia Pacific
Executives also worry about overreliance on IT vendors.
IT vendor criticality also made Gartner’s list of top concerns for risk and assurance leaders for the first time this quarter.
Zachary Ginsburg, senior research director at Gartner Risk and Audit Practice, said in a Gartner press release: “Customers with a concentration of services with a single vendor may face elevated risk in the event of outages, or they may face unanticipated changes in services. depending on new regulations or legal decisions in the EU, USA or elsewhere.
He alluded to The July CrowdStrike incidentwhich saw approximately 8.5 million Windows devices disabled worldwide and caused huge disruption to emergency services, airports, law enforcement, and other essential organizations.
SEE: What is CrowdStrike? Everything you need to know
“Because third parties, like SaaS providers, rely on other providers, organizations may not realize the full extent of their exposure,” Ginsburg added. Gartner predicts that 45% of companies worldwide will have suffered attacks on their software supply chains by 2025.
