Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity

The nearly 100-page paper, titled “Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations,” provides a comprehensive overview of the cybersecurity and privacy risks that come with the rapid development of both predictive and generative AI tools over the last few years.

Last year, two data scientists from security firm ZeroFOX conducted an experiment to see who was better at getting Twitter users to click on malicious links, humans or an artificial intelligence. The researchers taught an AI to study the behavior of social network users, and then design and implement its own phishing bait. In tests, the artificial hacker was substantially better than its human competitors, composing and distributing more phishing tweets than humans, and with a substantially better conversion rate.

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous promise for the future with its potential to reduce cybersecurity threats, through both prevention and quick response to intrusions.