Unfortunately, for organisations trying to defend themselves from cybercrime, AI holds the potential to aid attackers in conducting a range of malicious activities. Threat actors are constantly uncovering new ways of utilising AI to improve their chances of success.<\/p>\n

For example, cybercriminals can use AI capabilities to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, making them more impactful.<\/p>\n

Threat actors use AI during DDoS attacks by employing expert systems that optimise attack vectors based on reconnaissance scans and real-time performance test results. This allows cybercriminals to ascertain which attack methods are effective, increasing the damage an attack inflicts on a given target.<\/p>\n

On the generative AI side, threat actors are focused on\u00a0social engineering \u2013 to create\u00a0realistic-looking emails and documents that are very difficult to distinguish from genuine articles. This allows for generative AI-driven phishing using advanced language models.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, cybercriminals are also using malicious generative AI tools, including WormGPT and FraudGPT, to carry out targeted phishing campaigns at a larger scale than ever before. These tools allow attackers to compromise business emails and use machine learning to produce deceptive content respectively.<\/p>\n

Weaponising generative AI has introduced new methods of accessing personal information. For instance, the use of deepfake audio enables bad actors to imitate trusted voices for fraudulent transactions, while generated deepfake images or videos can even bypass biometric facial identification.<\/p>\n