AI In Battling Cybercrimes: Is It Your Ally Or Saboteur?

As many businesses become ridiculous targets of cybercrimes, their information and other digital assets are at grave risk. Not only does the information fall into the wrong hands, but companies also lose billions of dollars.

As hackers are getting smarter within a splash of seconds, the current conventional methods to curb these cyber attacks are inefficient. Because they fail to cope with the vigorous pace at which the cyber attacks refine.

Perhaps AI (Artificial Intelligence) could be your savior. After all, AI has become the buzzword in our lives as it continues to take away some of our jobs that involve repetitive and time consuming tasks at the time of writing.

So read on to find out its impact in the cybersecurity arena in this article. But, first and foremost, let’s dive into the rise in cybercrimes next.

The Rise in Cybercrimes

Each year cybersecurity threats continue to grow at a massive scale. According to research that Check Point conducted, in 2022 cyberattacks escalated by 38% compared to 2021. In 2023, Statista predicted the cost of cybercrimes to be a whopping $11 trillion in contrast to $ 8.4 trillion in 2022.

A large proportion of these attacks are due to phishing, malware, ransomware attacks, and social engineering attacks. Others occur as organizations move towards the cloud, which has become a breeding ground for hackers to steal confidential and sensitive data.

As mentioned-above conventional cybersecurity prevention methods, including anti-virus software, firewalls, encryption methods, or vulnerability scanning, may no longer be viable for modern, sophisticated attacks that hackers launch through mobile, open source software and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks).

So is AI the savior? Find out next.

Is AI The Savior?

Given the popularity of AI in the present context, it’s not surprising that AI has already entered the cybersecurity market. A recent Acumen Research and Consulting report shows that demand for AI-based cybersecurity products is expected to reach a massive $133.8 billion by 2030.

AI integrated with Machine Learning (ML) has the capacity to discover insights from data by observing the relevant patterns in them, analyzing massive volumes of data, identifying trends, and finding anomalies that could be signs of a future cyberattack.

Furthermore, AI-based systems can uncover data hidden on the dark web, fight spam and phishing, protect online confidential data, recognize advanced malware, and predict risks.

While AI has the true potential to combat cybercrimes, it can also assist cybercrimes. So AI is a double edged sword that you must use with caution.

Next, you’ll discover what cybercrimes AI can combat.

How AI Can Prevent Cybercrimes?

As you are already aware, AI technology learns more over time, and hence it can predict and detect cyberattacks at a superhuman speed that humans can only dream of.

Here are the types of attacks that AI can help you prevent::

Phishing

Phishing is a type of cyberattack where the attacker contacts the potential victim mainly through email, appearing to be a legitimate user known to the victim. Then they persuade the potential victim to provide sensitive and confidential data such as credit card information, company bank details, and usernames and passwords. Through this information, the attacker launches cyberattacks resulting in trillions of losses to the company or the individual.

AI helps to overcome phishing by investigating all links and attachments in all emails pertaining to an entire organization. So when a phishing attack does occur, the AI system will determine that neither the receiver nor anyone in the peer circle in the company has visited the domain that the threat attacker has sent the mail from.

The genius behind this phishing solution is a leader in AI solutions for cybersecurity called Darktrace.

If you have the expertise and to all the skillful software engineers out there, you can also develop such AI-based programs to combat phishing. The concept is to create algorithms that learn and understand the patterns from huge piles of data and then identify any anomalies in such data. If there is any abnormal behavior, the algorithms can alert and send warning signals to the recipients in the network of any phishing attempts.

Authentication Protection

Along with phishing, another form of attack that frequently occurs is authentication attacks. With this technique, an attacker could guess either with trial and error or automated means the target’s username, password, cryptographic key, credit card number, and other sensitive data.

In March 2023, the greatest authentication attack of the year so far took place in Okta, putting all its clients’ data at risk.

AI, once again, can come to your rescue because traditional login authentication methods merely validate and verify user credentials only at the login stage. In contrast, AI programs could detect malicious attempts to hack data during an entire session the user is logged into the system.

For example, if a user moves to a new location or changes devices during a session, AI detects it and sends warning signals. Similarly, if a user attempts to access a resource they don’t need to complete, the AI programs you employ provide a warning alert.

A risk-based authentication company, OneLogin offers SmartFactor Authentication with the help of AI. It detects real-time login attempts and therefore enables the system admins or business stakeholders to take immediate actions and address the risks involved by defining the risk threshold levels and automatically adjusting the authentication requirements.

Even hackers have worked their way around infiltrating sophisticated authentication mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication (MAF). So the need for AI-authenticated methods such as OneLogin escalates daily.

Data Breaches

Another standard form of attack that hackers employ to breach online data is through DNS (Domain Name Service) is called DNS poisoning. DNS poisoning is when an attacker hijacks a DNS request and delivers a bogus (poisoned) response to the client through HTTP. This is a critical issue confronting businesses today, as more than 30,000 of these attacks occur daily.

Also, recent reports show that over 70% of cyberattacks occur through the DNS layer.

As a remedy for these destructive data breaches, an AI-powered company called DNSFilter has the ultimate solution. With the assistance of AI and ML, it inspects the DNS queries and analyzes any harmful queries or if threat actors are hiding.

If so, they block threats from visiting your website and filter them out. Due to this, DNS filtering occurring at the outer security layer of the internet; this type of filtering is called edge-layer protection.

Malware Attacks

Malware is another significant cybersecurity threat. However, AI and ML have the power to combat them. Leading provider of secure access service edge (SASE), Netskope, has created a thorough, multi-layered threat protection system to investigate the network traffic of its clients. Multiple inline quick scan engines and deep scans based on static and dynamic analysis are powered by AI/ML to help discover malware.

The Other Side Of The Coin

So far, we have looked at the bright side of AI. However, as you can deploy AI for any activity, cybercriminals have also taken advantage of it to launch cyber attacks. Let’s look at some real-world examples, shall we?

For instance, cybercriminals can use AI to automate bots to cause automatic phishing attacks targeting a large group of people simultaneously. These bots can go through social media profiles to create customized messages that appear legitimate.

So a user is more likely to click on it and resulting in you exposing data to the wrong hands.

On the other hand, hackers could employ AI to create fake images, videos, and audio recordings that look exactly like genuine ones. This technique is known as deepfakes which hackers could use to mimic famous people or a higher ranking profile in a company, such as CEO, Network administrators, or engineers, to gain unauthorized access to an information system.

Where Is The Future Heading To?

As far as the future of cybersecurity goes, as you can see, there are two sides to the coin. So to answer the question of whether AI is your savior in cybersecurity, yes, if you utilize it correctly. Added to that, AI alone will not entirely wipe away cybersecurity concerns. Humans need to step on as well.

In other words, you need the expertise of human analysts or engineers and powerful AI systems to achieve a synergistic output.

You can define a strategy where you can allocate time-consuming and low-level security risks to competent security engineers. Whereas high-level security issues to the AI.

So the order of the day is an integrated effort by humans and AI to combat cybercrimes.

Conclusion

AI and ML play a critical role in combating cybercrimes. That being said, hackers use these two prominent technologies to launch cyberattacks on a massive scale.

To protect your online data and business from cyberattacks, you need a collective effort from humans and AI to expertise in threat analysis and detection.

Companies can identify potential weaknesses and adjust to novel and unidentified dangers with the help of AI-based solutions