Even though it’s still very new, generative AI is already affecting all sorts of industries. Unfortunately, not all of these changes will be for the better, notes Rob Joyce, cybersecurity director for the NSA. Wired reported that Joyce told a room of RSA security conference attendees, “You can’t walk around RSA without talking about AI and malware. I think we’ve all seen the explosion. I won’t say it’s delivered yet, but this truly is some game-changing technology.”
In particular, Joyce noted of the potential effect on the quality of phishing attacks, and how foreign actors will be able to take advantage of the tool’s language capabilities to create sophisticated messages, as reported by Wired. Said Joyce, “That Russian-native hacker who doesn’t speak English well is no longer going to craft a crappy email to your employees. It’s going to be native-language English, it’s going to make sense, it’s going to pass the sniff test … So that right there is here today, and we are seeing adversaries, both nation-state and criminals, starting to experiment with the ChatGPT-type generation to give them English language opportunities.”
Joyce also mentioned the tool’s ability to boost the coding capability of its users, or allow them to make tweaks to existing code to help malicious attacks evade existing detection tools and software. Said Joyce of this ability, “That [is] going to be challenging for us in the near term.”
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