According to Gartner, cyberattacks stoked by using unnatural knowledge pose the greatest threat to businesses for the third consecutive quarter.

The auditing firm polled 286 top danger and assurance professionals from July through September, and 80 % of them cited AI-enhanced destructive problems as the main danger they were concerned about. This is n’t surprising, as evidence suggests AI-assisted attacks are on the rise.

Another widely cited emerging risks outlined in the review include AI-assisted propaganda, escalating social polarization, and misaligned corporate skill profiles.

Intruders are using AI to create malware, create phishing emails, and more

With a text that “was very good to have been written with the aid of GenAI,” HP intercepted an email campaign that was spreading trojan in the wild in June. The VBScript was carefully structured, and each control had a remark, which may prove an unnecessary work for a individual to read.

The scientists then used GenAI to create a text, which suggested the original ransomware was at least half AI-generated.

Notice: 20 % of Generative AI’ Jailbreak ‘ Attacks are Powerful

Security strong Vipre detected two-fifths of the next quarter’s company email compromise attacks, and two-fifths of them were caused by AI. The best goals were Directors, followed by HR and IT staff.

Usman Choudhary, VIPRE’s chief product and technology officer, said in the media launch:” Wrongdoers are presently leveraging sophisticated AI techniques to create compelling phishing letters, mimicking the tone and style of legitimate contacts”.

Retail sites only experienced an average of 569, 884 AI-driven problems each day from April to September, according to Imperva Threat Research. Experts said that resources such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, as well as special machines that scrape sites for LLM training information, are being used to carry distributed denial-of-service attacks and business logic abuse, for example.

More ethical hackers are admitting to using GenAI, too, with the proportion increasing from 64 % to 77 % in the last year, according to a report from BugCrowd. These experts say it assists with die-channel problems, fault-injection problems, and automating virtualized attacks to instantly breach various devices. But if the’ good guys’ are finding AI valuable, then so will the bad actors.

The rise in these attacks should n’t surprise anyone.

AI can lower the barrier to entry for cyber crimes, as less-skilled criminals can use it to generate deepfakes, scan networks for entry points, reconnaissance, and more. Researchers at ETH Zurich recently developed a model that could be used to identify humans and bots 100 % of the time in Google reCAPTCHAv2.

Analysts from security firm Radware predicted at the start of the year that this newfound accessibility would lead to the creation of private GPT models that are used for nefarious purposes. Additionally, they anticipate that as more malicious actors become proficient with LLMs and generative adversarial networks, the number of zero-day exploits and deepfake scams will rise.

Indeed, Google’s Mandiant tracked 97 total zero-day vulnerabilities that were discovered and exploited in 2023, marking a 56 % increase from a year earlier. Deepfakes were named by Microsoft as one of the most well-known attack types by the escalating ransomware wave last month.

SEE: AI Deepfakes Rising as Risk for APAC Organisations

Executives are also concerned about over-reliance on IT vendors

For the first time this quarter, senior risk and assurance executives ‘ list of top concerns about IT vendor criticality was included by Gartner’s list of top concerns.

According to a Gartner press release,” Customers with a concentration of services with one vendor may face increased risk in the event of outages, or they may face unanticipated changes in services based on new regulations or legal decisions in the EU, U.S. or elsewhere.”

He alluded to July’s CrowdStrike incident, which saw about 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide disabled and caused huge disruption to emergency services, airports, law enforcement agencies, and other essential organizations.

SEE: What is CrowdStrike? Everything You Need to Know

” Because third parties, like SaaS vendors, rely on other vendors, organizations may not realize the full extent of their exposure”, Ginsburg added. By 2025, according to Gartner, 45 % of businesses worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains.