Some of the earliest adopters of innovative tech aren’t blue-chip companies but shady players who operate on the margins. Any tech aficionado will tell you how some of the pioneers of streaming, e-commerce and affiliate marketing were companies behind sleaze and porn. Frederick Lane, author of ‘Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age’ put it best when he said that the porn industry blazed a commercial path that other industries hastened to follow.
Given the billions of dollars that cybercrime pulls in nowadays, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that cybercriminals—many of them state-sponsored threat actors—are using AI in innovative ways to fuel cybercrime sprees. Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, which is preferred by some users for its excellence in natural language processing, just released a threat intelligence report that is eye-opening. In the report, the AI company has laid bare how cybercriminals used Claude with stunning effect, possibly boosting illicit earnings from crime manifold. By using Claude for evil, these hackers were able to build sophisticated malicious tools that they did not have the skills or expertise to otherwise develop.
Anthropic provided multiple use cases—from cybercriminals using Claude for developing malware tools to getting it to create scary ransom notes, to state-sponsored hackers using AI to create elaborate false identities, work repositories and more to bag jobs and stay employed at Fortune 500 companies as remote workers. It is clear from these cases that AI models are being used to run sophisticated criminal operations as cybercriminals embed AI in all aspects of their malicious operations. What is increasingly worrisome is that AI is lowering the barriers to sophisticated cybercrime as criminals with basic technical skills are leveraging AI to engage in activity that might have required years of training in the pre-AI era.
This is alarming news for CISOs leading security at companies since this makes cybersecurity increasingly tougher to manage, especially as AI tools are self-learning and have the ability to adapt in real-time and evade security systems deployed for malware detection. Cybersecurity strategy and the CISO role is more important than ever in the AI-led times we live and work in.
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