Have you heard about the natural language processing tool that utilizes AI technology? It is called ChatGPT, and it allows you to have conversations and assist with composing emails, essays, code, and more.

Here’s what ChatGPT is all about: Created by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, ChatGPT is free to try during its research preview. It interacts conversationally, answering follow-up questions, admitting its mistakes, challenging incorrect premises, and rejecting inappropriate requests. It can be a good debugging companion, explaining the bug, fixing it, and explaining the fix.

Another benefit of ChatGPT is automating security incident analysis. For example, when cybersecurity analysts respond to an alert about a potential incident, they must manually pull data from various data sources. Potentially, with ChatGPT, analysts could gather the information from a SIEM and run it through ChatGPT to return a narrative that provides a clear picture of what happened. However, the value of generative AI is lopsided in favor of nefarious usage.

Threat actors have begun to use it to write malicious code, especially malware. ChatGPT lowers the entry barrier for inexperienced bad guys while empowering skilled cybercriminals to speed up their cyber attacks. Threat actors can create an enormous volume of sophisticated phishing emails with minimal effort. They can train a language model to generate code designed to evade detection by security tools while carrying out attacks such as data theft or denial of service. The AI has the potential to power a fake chatbot disguised as a customer service representative, resulting in victims tricked into giving over sensitive information. When considering such risks, this increase in attacks in an industry already plagued with an employment gap will further compound these issues.

It’s not farfetched that AI will be able to use readily available tools to scope out an environment and quickly identify the best path into an organization for ransomware. As AI and cyber criminals become more sophisticated, cybersecurity experts like GuardSight are staying ahead of adversaries.