The Rise and Rise of Cybersecurity: The Edge Considerably Moves From Defensive To Offensive

We need to invest massively in large-scale encryption, zero-trust architectures and improved authentication mechanisms now. Otherwise, we will not be able to cope with the exponential rise of Generative AI as an attacker. And it knows all the phases of Kill Chain, and be able to conduct an advanced persistent threat like no other one ever produced, and will then be able to act on its advantages.

Today’s cybersecurity is the canary in the coal mine … get ready for a massive disruption to our world with next-generation AI-driven attacks. For this, we need to invest massively in our critical national infrastructure protection, or our societies could collapse.

In the UK, Wannacry nearly brought the NHS to its knees by a simple piece of ransomware. But, in the future, it might not be so lucky, especially in the rise of the power of adversarial AI for attacks.

With this rise of AI, we will move from defensive systems having the edge to offensive systems having a considerable edge, and where our existing defensive mechanisms will look so puny. Overall, advanced tools will be in the hands of millions of adversaries, and where our current ransomware attacks will be seen as so naive — in the way that the Morris Worm seems to us now.

So, get ready for AI agents crawling a data breach from a company, matching it to all of the legal texts in the world, automatically defining all the breaches of privacy in every region of the world, and then automating the whole of the legal process for these breaches.

And how does the company get breached? Well, an AI agent sets it sights on spear phishing key entities in the company. It reads social media and LinkedIn posts and knows exactly the people to target and what they like. After which is then crafts perfectly focused messages to them, “Hi, Bob. I see the Scotland won at the rugby at the weekend. Do you want to give a keynote at our conference? If so, I’ll send you an email with the details of getting setup?” The setup then involves a faked-up login within a trusted page, or a targeted trojan. You name it, the AI bot will be able to craft whatever is required to eventually gain access to the system and breach data.

The future attacks will be millions of times more targeted and sophisticated than they are now.

Say goodbye to simple attacks and hello to a whole new world. Please invest now in getting the finest people together for this new wave of cyber attacks. This is not a prediction — this is a truth. The rise in the power of AI over the next year or two will be vast, and soon, you will struggle to differentiate fact from fiction. The whole of the cybersecurity industry needs to move their skills up a few levels, and there needs to be a better pipeline in creating the defenders of our future.