Just like two sides of a coin, generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be used positively or negatively.
“Generative AI tools have recently generated huge attention due to their potential to change how businesses operate, people learn, and online content is developed. But they can also be used by cyber criminals for social engineering and phishing attacks, to generate malware and ransomware code, to help with password cracking, and even to impersonate a company’s chatbots or online tools,” says Ravi Rajendran, Cohesity’s vice-president for Asia Pacific and Japan.
Steve Ledzian, CTO of Mandiant (a part of Google Cloud), adds: “The most immediate threat posed by generative AI is in the area of phishing. In the past, grammatical or spelling errors have helped to alert careful readers that something was “fishy”. However, generative AI can now produce articulate, professional-sounding text that may be more believable and convincing than anything we have experienced. We will all need to be extra careful, especially when receiving emails from outside our organisation.”
Fortunately, most organisations today have shifted from a focus on preventing cyber incidents to becoming resilient in the face of an attack. “The key difference is that organisations now acknowledge that no prevention is 100% effective and that while it is possible to reduce the risk of a cyber intrusion, it is not possible to eliminate the risk,” explains Ledzian.
Dwell time, he adds, is one area organisations in Asia Pacific should improve on. Dwell time is the amount of time between an attacker’s successful intrusion into an organisation and the discovery of the intrusion. Mandiant’s M-Trends 2023 report reveals that the average dwell time for Asia Pacific was 33 days last year, while that for ransomware was 18 days.
“The best thing organisations can do to increase cyber resilience is significantly reducing dwell time. This requires a team of specialised experts to monitor networks 24/7 for intrusions that may have occurred due to prevention failures. Due to the cybersecurity skills shortage, these experts are difficult to hire, train, and retain, so many organisations are turning to outsourced managed detection and response services to provide this capability and increase their resilience,” says Ledzian.
