If machines powered by artificial intelligence threaten the way we work, what if cyber criminals take control of the AI?
There has been a lot written about how artificial intelligence or AI, usually in the guise of machine-learning, is changing the way we defend networks and data from criminal endeavour. But what if we flip this around; what can AI do for the bad guys? Forget the rise of the robots enslaving humanity, a far more likely science factual future sees criminal gangs in possession of AI applications.
To answer this question, we should first look at where the criminal fraternity is now, as far as shifting the cyber-crime model is concerned. Certainly, over the last few years there has been a move away from transitional online “smash-and-grab” crimes to more sophisticated and structured “as-a-service” models. These leverage commercially available applications such as predictive data analytics to identify future trends from past attacks, optimal timings and even victim profiling to determine the most likely to yield the best attack exposure.
