What is adversarial artificial intelligence and why does it matter?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a critical component in how government, business and citizens defend themselves against cyber attacks. Starting with technology designed to automate specific manual tasks, and advancing to machine learning using increasingly complex systems to parse data, breakthroughs in deep learning capabilities will become an integral part of the security agenda. Much attention is paid to how these capabilities are helping to build a defence posture. But how enemies might harness AI to drive a new generation of attack vectors, and how the community might respond, is often overlooked. Ultimately, the real danger of AI lies in how it will enable attackers.
Adversarial AI is the malicious development and use of advanced digital technology and systems that have intellectual processes typically associated with human behaviour. These include the ability to learn from past experiences, and to reason or discover meaning from complex data.
Changes in the threat landscape are already apparent. Criminals are already harnessing automated reconnaissance, target exploitation and network penetration end-to-end. Soon, technology will enable them to automate every element of their attack cycle, including currently very manual processes such as the ability to learn fraud controls and to industralize cash-out and money laundering tactics.
By introducing new scalable systems, which would typically require human labour and expertise for attacks, criminals will be able to invest resources and capacity into building and modifying new infrastructure against target sets.
Technology will enable criminal groups to become increasingly effective and more efficient. It will allow them to finely tune attacks in real-time, adapt to their environment and learn defence postures faster. This will be reflected across all attack scenarios, industries and technology platforms.
Finally, and most importantly, the next generation of technical systems will enable attack methodologies that were previously unfeasible. This will alter the threat landscape in a series of shifts, bypassing entire generations of controls that have been put in place to defend against attacks.
Advances in a new generation of systems available to attackers will require a holistic and multi-tiered approach, based on solid security foundations.
