NCSC: AI to significantly boost cyber threats over next two years

A report published by the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns that AI will substantially increase cyber threats over the next two years. 

The centre warns of a surge in ransomware attacks in particular; involving hackers deploying malicious software to encrypt a victim's files or entire system and demanding a ransom payment for the decryption key.

The NCSC assessment predicts AI will enhance threat actors' capabilities mainly in carrying out more persuasive...

24 January 2024 | Applications

McAfee unveils AI-powered deepfake audio detection

McAfee has revealed a pioneering AI-powered deepfake audio detection technology, Project Mockingbird, during CES 2024. This proprietary technology aims to defend consumers against the rising menace of cybercriminals employing fabricated, AI-generated audio for scams, cyberbullying, and manipulation of public figures' images.

Generative AI tools have enabled cybercriminals to craft convincing scams, including voice cloning to impersonate family members seeking money or manipulating...

8 January 2024 | Applications

OpenAI battles DDoS against its API and ChatGPT services

OpenAI has been grappling with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting its API and ChatGPT services over the past 24 hours.

While the company has not yet disclosed specific details about the source of these attacks, OpenAI acknowledged that they are dealing with "periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack."

Users affected by these incidents reported encountering errors such as "something seems to have gone...

9 November 2023 | Applications

GitLab: Developers view AI as ‘essential’ despite concerns

A survey by GitLab has shed light on the views of developers on the landscape of AI in software development.

The report, titled ‘The State of AI in Software Development,’ presents insights from over 1,000 global senior technology executives, developers, and security and operations professionals.

The report reveals a complex relationship between enthusiasm for AI adoption and concerns about data privacy, intellectual property, and security.

“Enterprises...

6 September 2023 | Applications

NCSC: Chatbot ‘prompt injection’ attacks pose growing security risk

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued a stark warning about the increasing vulnerability of chatbots to manipulation by hackers, leading to potentially serious real-world consequences.

The alert comes as concerns rise over the practice of "prompt injection" attacks, where individuals deliberately create input or prompts designed to manipulate the behaviour of language models that underpin chatbots.

Chatbots have become integral in various applications...

30 August 2023 | Artificial Intelligence

Assessing the risks of generative AI in the workplace

Amid the exponential growth of generative AI, there is a pressing need to evaluate the legal, ethical, and security implications of these solutions in the workplace.

One of the concerns highlighted by industry experts is often the lack of transparency regarding the data on which many generative AI models are trained.

There is insufficient information about the specifics of the training data used for models like GPT-4, which powers applications such as ChatGPT. This lack...

17 July 2023 | Applications

The risk and reward of ChatGPT in cybersecurity

Unless you’ve been on a retreat in some far-flung location with no internet access for the past few months, chances are you’re well aware of how much hype and fear there’s been around ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI. Maybe you’ve seen articles about academics and teachers worrying that it’ll make cheating easier than ever. On the other side of the coin, you might have seen the articles evangelising all of ChatGPT’s potential...

3 April 2023 | Applications

F-Secure details nature-inspired AI project harnessing ‘swarm intelligence’

fsecure project blackfin ai autonomous agents artificial intelligence cybersecurity infosec

Cybersecurity giant F-Secure has detailed Project Blackfin, an AI initiative which harnesses nature-inspired “swarm intelligence” techniques.

The concept sounds similar to Fetch.ai in that decentralised autonomous AI agents will collaborate in order to achieve common goals.

Cambridge-based Fetch.ai is focusing its efforts on the use of autonomous AI agents for IoT purposes. Naturally, F-Secure is currently seeking to use such agents to further improve the company’s...

21 November 2019 | Security

McAfee: Keep an eye on the humans pulling the levers, not the AIs

Security firm McAfee has warned that it’s more likely humans will use AI for malicious purposes rather than it going rogue itself.

It’s become a cliché metaphor, but people are still concerned a self-thinking killer AI like SkyNet from the film Terminator will be created.

McAfee CTO Steve Grobman spoke at this year’s RSA conference in San Francisco and warned the wrong humans in control of powerful AIs are his company’s primary concern.

To provide an...

6 March 2019 | Security

Microsoft wants AI to predict when a PC is going to be infected

Microsoft wants to harness AI's incredible prediction abilities to detect PC malware attacks before they even happen. The company has sponsored a competition on Kaggle which challenges data scientists to create models which predict if a device is likely to become infected with malware given a current machine state. In a blog post, Microsoft wrote:

“The competition provides academics and researchers with varied backgrounds a fresh opportunity to work on a...

14 December 2018 | Microsoft