Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting gen AI technologies to enhance the sophistication and efficiency of their attacks.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the technology industry and this is equally true for the cybercrime ecosystem, as cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging generative AI to improve their tactics, techniques, and procedures and deliver faster, stronger, and sneakier attacks.
But as with legitimate use of emerging AI tools, abuse of generative AI for nefarious ends isn’t so much about the novel and unseen as it is about productivity and efficiency, lowering the barrier to entry, and offloading automatable tasks in favor of higher-order thinking on the part of the humans involved.
“AI doesn’t necessarily result in new types of cybercrimes, and instead enables the means to accelerate or scale existing crimes we are familiar with, as well as introduce new threat vectors,” Dr. Peter Garraghan, CEO/CTO of AI security testing vendor Mindgard and a professor at the UK’s Lancaster University, tells CSO.
Garraghan continues: “If a legitimate user can find utility in using AI to automate their tasks, capture complex patterns, lower the barrier of technical entry, reduced costs, and generate new content, why wouldn’t a criminal do the same?
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The rapid rise of DeepSeek , a Chinese generative AI platform, heightened concerns this week over the United States’ AI dominance as Americans increasingly adopt Chinese-owned digital services. With ongoing criticism over alleged security issues posed by TikTok’s relationship to China, DeepSeek’s own privacy policy confirms that it stores user data on servers in the country.
Meanwhile, security researchers at Wiz discovered that DeepSeek left a critical database exposed online, leaking over 1 million records, including user prompts, system logs, and API authentication tokens. As the platform promotes its cheaper R1 reasoning model, security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek’s chatbot and found lagging safety protections as compared to Western competitors.
Brandon Russell, the 29-year-old cofounder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi guerrilla organization, is on trial this week over an alleged plot to knock out Baltimore’s power grid and trigger a race war. The trial provides a look into federal law enforcement’s investigation into a disturbing propaganda network aiming to inspire mass casualty events in the US and beyond.
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Source : https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-google-gemini-us-cyberattacks/
