For the third quarter in a row, Gartner found that cyberattacks launched using artificial intelligence pose the greatest risk to organizations.
The consulting firm surveyed 286 senior risk and insurance executives from July to September, and 80% of them cited AI-enabled malicious attacks as the threat they were most concerned about. This is not surprising, as evidence suggests that AI-powered attacks are on the rise.
Other commonly cited emerging risks shown in the report These include AI-powered misinformation, rising political polarization, and mismatched organizational talent profiles.
Attackers are using AI to write malware, craft phishing emails, and more
In June, HP intercepted an email campaign spreading malware in the wild using a script “It is very likely that it was written with the help of GenAI.” VBScript was elegantly designed, and every command had a comment, which would prove to be unnecessary effort for a human to write.
The researchers then used GenAI to produce a script and found similar output, suggesting that the original malware was at least partially generated by AI.
See: 20% of AI jailbreak attacks are successful
The number of business email compromise attacks detected by security firm Vipre in the second quarter was 20% higher than in the same period in 2023, and Two-fifths of it was generated by artificial intelligence. The top targets were CEOs, followed by HR and IT staff.
Usman Chaudhry, Chief Product and Technology Officer at VIPRE, said press release: “Criminals are now leveraging sophisticated AI algorithms to craft convincing phishing emails, imitating the tone and style of legitimate communications.”
Retail locations alone saw an average of 569,884 AI attacks every day From April to September, according to Imperva Threat Research. Tools such as ChatGPT, Cloud, and Gemini, as well as special bots that scrape websites for LLM training data, are being used to carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks and misuse business logic, for example, the researchers said.
More ethical hackers are admitting to using GenAI as well The percentage increased from 64% to 77% last yearAccording to a report by BugCrowd. These researchers say that it helps in lethal channel attacks, fault injection attacks, and automating parallel attacks to compromise multiple devices simultaneously. But if the “good guys” view AI as valuable, then bad actors will too.
The increase in these attacks should not be surprising
AI can lower the barrier to entry for cybercrime, as less skilled criminals can use it to create deep fakes, scan networks for entry points, reconnaissance, and much more. Researchers at ETH Zurich recently Created a model that can solve Google reCAPTCHAv2 puzzles It is used to distinguish between humans and robots 100% of the time.
Analysts at security firm Radware predicted at the beginning of the year that this new access would lead to the development of special GPT models used for nefarious purposes. They also expect the number of zero-day exploits and deep fraud to increase as malicious actors become more proficient in manipulating LLMs and generative adversarial networks.
In fact, Google subsidiary Mandiant tracked 97 zero-day vulnerabilities discovered and exploited in 2023, marking a record number 56% increase From the previous year. Last month, Microsoft listed deepfakes among the top types of attacks used by prolific ransomware groups.
See: The Rise of AI Deepfakes as a Risk to Asia-Pacific Organizations
Executives are also concerned about over-reliance on IT vendors
The importance of IT vendors also made it to Gartner’s list of top concerns among senior risk and assurance executives for the first time this quarter.
“Customers who focus on services with a single vendor may face elevated risks in the event of a service outage, or may experience unexpected changes to services,” Zachary Ginsberg, senior research director in Gartner’s risk and audit practice, said in a Gartner press release. Depending on new regulations or legal decisions in the European Union, the United States or elsewhere.
He pointed to the CrowdStrike incident in July, which saw about 8.5 million Windows devices disabled worldwide and caused significant disruption to emergency services, airports, law enforcement agencies and other essential organizations.
See: What is CrowdStrike? Everything you need to know
“Because third parties, such as SaaS vendors, rely on other vendors, organizations may not realize the full extent of their exposure,” Ginsberg added. Gartner expects that 45% of companies globally They will experience attacks on their software supply chains By 2025.