Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. AI can be divided into several different types, including:

• Rule-based systems, which follow a set of predetermined rules to reach a conclusion
• Expert systems, which use a knowledge base to make decisions
• Neural networks, which are modeled after the human brain and can learn from data
• Natural language processing, which enables machines to understand and interpret human language

AI technology has been developed in various areas such as image recognition, self-driving cars, personal assistants, and so on. There are several security concerns regarding AI technology. Here are a couple of examples:

Data poisoning: In some cases, attackers may try to inject malicious data into the training dataset to “poison” the model and cause it to make incorrect decisions.

Physical safety: Some AI applications, such as self-driving cars or industrial robots, may pose physical safety risks if they malfunction or are compromised by an attacker.

By the way, everything you’ve read on this page (up until now) was not written by a human, but by an AI chatbot. It was simply asked to define artificial intelligence and explain the related security concerns. If you wanted to, you could ask that same bot to write poetry about cats, explain quantum physics, or basically anything else you can think of. The chatbot is a basic example that barely captures AI’s capabilities.

As it evolves, AI technology will become even more advanced with abilities we never thought possible of machines. This, of course, ushers in all sorts of interesting conversations regarding human intelligence vs. machine intelligence, and what might happen if the latter surpasses the former.

Those conversations make this quote from the 1993 movie Jurassic Park eerily relevant: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Nonetheless, AI is an active part of our lives. And it’s not hard to imagine cybercriminals leveraging AI to carry out attacks in the near future. As an example, AI models could learn about a real person and then use bots to mimic their actions and language. This would allow criminals to create advanced phishing campaigns that target specific people at a much more effective rate than any human could.

It’s also possible AI will be used to circumvent attacks from criminal hackers. But even as those technologies become more of a reality, advancements in cyberdefenses will always lag behind advancements in cyberattacks.

Therefore, the future of security is the same as the present: humans, not machines. It will take a human effort to identify modern attacks and prevent them from finding success. So stay alert, stay informed, and remember that the last line of defense was, is, and will continue to be people like you.

Article retrieved from The Internet of Hackable Things by The Security Awareness Company – KnowBe4, Inc. (2023)