AI. Its Here. To Help You. Not. So. Much.
Not surprisingly AI has both a good side and a dark side. The good side is well publicized. Today I am going to talk about the dark side.
Scam calls have been a long time problem. People lose tens or hundreds of millions dollars a year to them. The future is scam calls running entirely by AI. Here is what an Ai driven scam call campaign flowchart looks like.
Researchers have already demonstrated that they can do this, bypassing the so-called AI guard rails. Find the details at the link. Credit: Helpnet Security
Next comes PromptLock. It claims to be the first AI-powered ransomware. ESET claims that it is only a proof-of-concept or work in progress at the moment, but it appears to have all of the functionality of traditional ransomware. It relies on hard-coded prompts to generate scripts on the fly and uses these scripts to do things like enumerate files and exfiltrate data and even encrypt data. Or it may just destroy the data. This malware as it stands today would require a significantly compromised network to work, but this is only version 0.1, Credit: Security Week
This one is more real. Anthropic released a report yesterday that said that a hacker used their code AI agent for nearly all steps of a data extortion operation that targeted nearly 20 companies across different industries. This, again, is only version 1. More mature than the version 0.1 above, but not fully baked. Still, very scary. Credit: Helpnet Security
The Anthropic report says, in part:
Anthropic didn’t pull punches about the seriousness of the campaign; in a blog post announcing the threat intelligence report, the generative AI company said GTG-2002 used AI to an “unprecedented degree.” Further, Anthropic said the campaign represents a turning point for AI-assisted cybercrime and warned that threat actors are now using AI tools to actually perform attacks rather than to simply facilitate them.
https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/anthropic-ai-automate-data-extortion-campaign
So in case you were wondering, the age of AI driven cyber crime is here and there is likely nothing the AI companies are willing to do that will stop it. That means you are on your own to protect yourself and your company. Contact us if you would like assistance.
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