Report by Europol, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and Trend Micro: “… looking into current and predicted criminal uses of artificial intelligence (AI)… The report provides law enforcers, policy makers and other organizations with information on existing and potential attacks leveraging AI and recommendations on how to mitigate these risks.
“AI promises the world greater efficiency, automation and autonomy. At a time where the public is getting increasingly concerned about the possible misuse of AI, we have to be transparent about the threats, but also look into the potential benefits from AI technology.” said Edvardas Šileris, Head of Europol’s Cybercrime Centre. “This report will help us not only to anticipate possible malicious uses and abuses of AI, but also to prevent and mitigate those threats proactively. This is how we can unlock the potential AI holds and benefit from the positive use of AI systems.”
The report concludes that cybercriminals will leverage AI both as an attack vector and an attack surface. Deepfakes are currently the best-known use of AI as an attack vector. However, the report warns that new screening technology will be needed in the future to mitigate the risk of disinformation campaigns and extortion, as well as threats that target AI data sets.
For example, AI could be used to support:
- Convincing social engineering attacks at scale
- Document-scraping malware to make attacks more efficient
- Evasion of image recognition and voice biometrics
- Ransomware attacks, through intelligent targeting and evasion
- Data pollution, by identifying blind spots in detection rules..
The three organizations make several recommendations to conclude the report:
- Harness the potential of AI technology as a crime-fighting tool to future-proof the cybersecurity industry and policing
- Continue research to stimulate the development of defensive technology
- Promote and develop secure AI design frameworks
- De-escalate politically loaded rhetoric on the use of AI for cybersecurity purposes
- Leverage public-private partnerships and establish multidisciplinary expert groups…(More)”.