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The rise of AI continues to be a major game-changer in many positive ways. However, AI also creates significant dark and untapped areas for misinformation. These range from fabricating fake cyber-attacks, to disrupting incident response plans, to manipulating massive quantities of data used for automation. AI-powered engineering tools can also expose weak areas within established security systems and processes within near seconds while maintaining pinpoint accuracy.
One of the many downsides to AI is that it can examine various amounts of data to quickly identify the most effective points to leverage a massive exploit. This creates manic confusion as a smokescreen while going undetected as it hits a primary target.
Below are ways in which AI can lead to vital disinformation techniques:
Undermining incidence response plans – AI has already proven its ability to create false external incidents to mislead security teams. This leads to misallocation of resources, confusion in response procedures, and exposes incident mitigation strategies.
Manipulating data for misinformation objectives – Hackers can use AI to inject false data sets, generate volumes of poisoned data, or even manipulate existing data to compromise the integrity and reliability of data-driven decision-making processes. If this falsified data can infiltrate these targeted network systems, the end result can undermine the integrity of the automated data. This can lead to catastrophic results and force the companies to incorrectly budget for areas of lower priority while the hacker is using this time to exploit already examined areas that possess higher consequences.
Erosion of trust and total confidence – the result of providing misinformation from data sets when examining information systems has severe consequences, hurting the adequacy of business continuity plans designed for real-life events. The end result can be unique challenges for security personnel in distinguishing between genuine and fabricated information, which can take weeks to gain clarity.
To counter these threats, security teams must be highly skilled and able to quickly adapt their processes using innovative strategies. Companies affected will have to investigate innovative ways to employ machine learning algorithms that can discern and contain malicious AI-generated content literally within a millisecond to contain the damage.
Just as potential hackers have been planning attacks using AI, organizations can hopefully defend themselves by performing ongoing security monitoring and constantly examining their current procedures to redefine how they would respond with an early warning system. This can be achieved by running various security tools that would ideally recognize these AI attacks as quickly as possible.
Security leaders should initiate conversations across all levels of the organization to make sure they know how to collaborate effectively when disinformation is discovered, in order not to ruin their reputation. As AI gains more popularity, it also opens an endless list of ongoing attacks that can be executed at a moment’s notice with well-hidden disguises. To fight back, having the most skilled security professional is not an option, but rather a necessity. AI will be constantly reviewed and debated to limit the damage when attackers are planning the newest hacking attempts and to ensure the company’s reputation is maintained against this formidable threat.