How AI Can Threat Our Security? - Essay Sample

Introduction

According to the Hern (2018), the new artificial intelligence technologies might enable new forms of political disruption, physical attacks, and cybercrime in the coming years. The charitable sector, industry, and academic exports consider AI as dual usage of technology with a possible civilian, and potential military uses akin to hacking tools, nuclear power, and explosives. As the AI capabilities turn to be more widespread and influential, it is expected that the growing utilisation of AI systems results in the expansion of the existing threats through the introduction of new threats. AI can affect the society both positively and negatively.

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Artificial intelligence is a useful technology since most of the businesses currently use it when spotting malicious activities in a word in which spotting hackers have turned out to be difficult (Hern, 2018). The hackers mostly use advanced technology including encryption, cloud, and IoT which is a more significant threat. According to the 2018 Cybersecurity Report of Cisco, half of the web traffic is currently encrypted which is a dangerous and good thing. The awful thing about it is that it becomes difficult for the businesses to be able to spot the potential threats. This issue will make them spend more on AI since it has the capability of doing an excellent job as compared to humans.

Artificial Intelligence has the possibility of revolutionising the power of actors who are wrong in threatening the daily life. According to the digital sphere, AI can be used in lowering the barrier of entry in carrying out the damaging attacks. Furthermore, the technology might automate discovery of the rapidly select potential victims or essential software bugs for financial crime. It might also be used in abusing Facebook style algorithmic profiling in creating the social engineering attacks which are designed to maximise the likelihood that the user will possibly click a malicious link or even download an attachment which is infected.

It is believed that Artificial Intelligence is the only hope for cybersecurity. Machine learning and AI are essential facets of the future for information security and companies which fail to innovate and remain hesitant and adopt these systems might find themselves as a disadvantage ("Chronicle puts AI into action on security," 2018). The problem is becoming exposed to highly advanced attacks. AI is limitless meaning that it can be faster and smarter than any human being although there is a misconception that AI is meant to replace the security personnel. AI is also intended to be used as a supplement to the human talent in empowering the security teams with the agility and speed of mitigating threats efficiently.

On the issue of preventing zero-day and novel attacks, Artificial Intelligence works as an added layer in the traditional security control by flagging the potential threats which were not seen before ("Chronicle puts AI into action on security," 2018). In case a request to a web server that is being inspected with a traditional web application firewall cannot match the existing signature or rule, it does not mean that the request is malicious. Sometimes, requests might be malicious, and they might not get flagged with a traditional WAF which mainly relies on signatures and rules. Consequently, AI enabled WAF might view the incoming request as unusual because it might not have seen something like that before or the request can look similar to something which is malicious. AI enabled WAF then alerts the human operator that there is abnormal and it should be checked. Therefore, the human has the responsibility of determining in case the request is genuinely malicious and trains the artificial intelligence enabled WAF in blocking exact matches or even anything that is comparable to the request that it flagged. The AI enabled WAF, and human operator also works together in identifying the new threats, and more AI enabled WAF is trained then the better it gets. This case is not mainly about prediction, but the more observation that AI allowed WAF makes in getting ahead of the emerging threats.

AI can improve the lives of individuals and positively influence everything from governance, healthcare, economy, and security. However, almost all the technologies can be utilised for ill and proper purposes. According to Smith (2018), AI might be exploited with criminals, rogue states, and terrorist. AI can impact our society negatively since it can be used in carrying out physical attacks on people like hacking on self-driving cars with the aim of causing significant collisions. In case several robots are controlled with a single AI system in running a centralised server, a single attack might create simultaneous failures on the implausible scale. Dr Stone also says that if an individual might change all the traffic signals currently to a city to be green, then disaster will ensue (Smith, 2018). The fact that that electricity is relatively centralised make people vulnerable to large-scale blackouts. The solution to this issue will be implementing stronger security measures.

AI can also result in sophisticated phishing. In the future, attempts at accessing personal and sensitive information from a person might be carried out with AI entirely (Smith, 2018). These attacks might utilise AI system in completing some tasks successfully than any human operator. Moreover, fake video and fake news which are generated with AI and bots might influence the public opinion and disrupt all the layers of the society from media to politics. Usage of the social media bots in spreading fake news was seen as a reality in the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States (Smith, 2018). The well-trained bots might also develop a strategic advantage for the political parties and work as artificially intellectual propaganda machines which thrive in the low trust communities. AI system has the capability of producing synthetic images which are nearly indistinguishable from the photographs. Unfortunately, a few years ago images that were created were unrealistic and crude.

Conclusion

In conclusion, AI is both a useful and dangerous technology that might affect the society in the future. AI enables businesses to easily spot malicious activities that might jeopardise their information by leaking them to the enemies. It is believed that Artificial Intelligence is the only hope for cybersecurity as it is limitless. AI can also result in sophisticated phishing it might carry out the process of accessing sensitive and personal information in future. Therefore, this technology might affect the society in future through social media. It can be done by spreading fake vide and fake news to the public. The AI influence has increased, and this means that it is vulnerable to artificial intelligence misuse. The mainly discussed example entails weaponising the drone swarms and fitting them with self-driving technology and small explosives and setting them to carry out some untraceable assassinations referred to as slaughterbots.

References

Chronicle puts AI into action on security: The time has come for machine learning | TechBeacon. (2018). Retrieved from https://techbeacon.com/chronicle-puts-ai-action-security-time-has-come-machine-learning

Hern, A. (2018). The growth of AI could boost cybercrime and security threats, the report warns. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/21/ai-security-threats-cybercrime-political-disruption-physical-attacks-report\

Korolov, M. (2017). How AI can help you stay ahead of cybersecurity threats. Retrieved from https://www.cso.com.au/article/628869/how-ai-can-help-stay-ahead-cybersecurity-threats/

Smith, R. (2018). Three ways AI could threaten our world, and what we need to do to stay safe. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/3-ways-ai-could-threaten-our-world-and-what-we-need-to-do-to-stay-safe/