In the past year, generative AI technology has increased quite a lot. Because of the huge increase in the capabilities of AI there are 3 AI cyber-risks you should be aware of. But before we dive into that lets look at some of the positive impacts it can have on your business.
AI technology has a wide scope of capabilities that can be huge assets to small business as well as the biggest companies in your industry. A few of these impacts are increased agility for your business, boosted productivity, and smart data analysis.
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Increased Business Agility
In any area of business, it is important to keep up to date with technology as it keeps your business’ capabilities at the forefront. AI powered tools empower you to be able to respond to real-time information quickly and have swift reactions to customer demands, opportunities, and other changing scenarios.
Boosted Productivity
With AI, organizations now have the ability to boost productivity by significantly reducing, or even eliminating, mundane tasks. These tasks can instead be done with minimal human inputs thereby increasing capacity to devote to more crucial tasks.
Smart Data Analysis
Many of the recent developments in AI technology use what is called a Large Language Model (LLM). In a nutshell, a LLM has learned based on an enormous set of data. Because of the very nature of that learning, AI tools have the ability to help your organization sift through large quantities of data. So now your organization can make more educated decisions by looking at things such as market data or purchasing trends from your clients or whatever other large data sets need to be analyzed.
3 AI Cyber-risks You Should be Aware Of
As we just saw, there are several benefits of using AI in your organization. However, there are 3 AI cyber-risks you should be aware of also.
Deepfakes
Before AI tools, misinformation on the internet was not uncommon and unfortunately, these AI tools can be used by bad actors to make very convincing deepfakes. These deepfakes can be text, images, audio, and video allowing these bad actors to trick people as well as defaming others or leading to fraud. A key example where this sort of thing can become a problem is with the banking practice of Know Your Customer (KYC).
The use of AI can make a practice like KYC much harder to implement and enforce. While it can be difficult to identify deepfakes, a few things you can do is look for are anomalies in skin texture, shadows on the face, and blinking patterns.
AI-generated Code
Remember we mentioned earlier how AI can help you by boosting productivity? Using it to write code is just one of those examples, however, bad actors can also use it to write code faster and with a goal of maximizing the weaknesses in software on your computer. This AI-generated malware can be a big challenge for your organization. To counter it, be sure to educate your team about malware. You can also improve your layered security by strengthening firewalls, automated patching, and antivirus software.
Knowing where your vulnerabilities are can help you seal up those holes before cybercriminals extort them.
Phishing Scams Powered by AI
In the past, a big way to determine if an email was phishing was the poor grammar used in the text. Now, AI-generated phishing emails have better grammar so they can more easily slip by unsuspecting eyes. With this new capability available to cybercriminals, it is important to be more critical of incoming emails.
Pay close attention to details and avoid links, especially if they are suspicious. It is also a good idea for your organization to employ anti-phishing tools to protect users in your organization.
With technology there are always new advances that create new opportunities, as well as new challenges to navigate, and AI technology is just another iteration. It is important to become informed of AI’s capabilities so you can better protect your organization from the different security challenges out there.
And as always, we are here to help.
