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How ChatGPT is Changing the Cybersecurity Landscape

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT. It has garnered the attention of millions of users and promises tremendous potential across various industries.

However, it can also be exploited by cybercriminals to launch sophisticated attacks.

In this article, we will discuss different ways in which cybercriminals can exploit ChatGPT for deploying cyberattacks. And on the end, we will also explore how cybersecurity professionals can leverage it protect their systems against evolving threats.

AI-Generated Phishing Hits the Mainstream

Phishing is a simple but extremely common and highly effective form of cyberattack.

How does ChatGPT help hackers in their phishing attempts?

For starters, it can write more convincing phishing emails.

One of the biggest giveaways of phishing attempts is that they have grammatical errors, both intentional and unintentional.

Intentional when the attacker is trying to fool users with fake URLs or links that look legit, but has a minor error that is often easy to overlook. Unintentional when non-native English speakers try their best to put together coherent phrases and sentences in their phishing attempts.

For many innocent targets, these grammatical factors were a saving grace to detect and avoid such emails and messages. Now, ChatGPT takes all those errors and poor sentence structures away with one prompt. Phishing emails are now hard to detect.

More advanced hackers may use ChatGPT or other LLM-based models to create a full-fledged chatbot to pretend as customer support. People often trust websites that are well-built and look professional. Cybercriminals can integrate such chatbots into their platform to make it feel more legitimate. The bot will collect personal info from unsuspecting visitors in the disguise of support conversations.

ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots can also be integrated into social media and messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook, which allows hackers to improve their social engineering strategies on these platforms.

The worrying part is that writing an email with ChatGPT or setting up automated chatbots on social media platforms and websites are not extremely complicated tasks for most hackers.

ChatGPT Enables Polymorphous Malware

On the more complex side of hacking, a bigger cybersecurity risk the use of ChatGPT to create polymorphous malware.

A polymorphous malware is a special type of malware that automatically/systematically changes its code, thereby also changing its features. As such, they are incredibly difficult to detect.

Now some may counter that ChatGPT’s filter prevents it from engaging in conversation or answering prompts on topics that are inappropriate, harmful, or illegal. You can’t just ask it to write the full code for a malware.

But hackers can work their way around this limitation by manipulating ChatGPT.

One example is asking ChatGPT to generate code for specific functions for the malware, that are also used for legitimate software. Take data encryption for example. It’s a common feature for both malwares and normal applications like messaging platforms. So if a hacker were to ask ChatGPT to generate a special type of encryption script, the chatbot would oblige, not seeing this as a dangerous, illegal, or unethical request.

Hackers with less expertise and skillset can also create polymorphous malware with ChatGPT’s assistance.

How Can ChatGPT Improve Cybersecurity Defenses?

Now let’s put behind the AI-powered cybersecurity apocalypse and look at the bright side of things. How can ChatGPT help security professionals in improving their system’s resilience against cyber threats?

Pattern Recognition

Security experts extensively use tools like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to analyze vast amount of data. These tools use AI to detect patterns and anomalies within large datasets.

LLMs further facilitate the analysis of extensive logs, reports, and other text-based security-related data for pattern detection in potential cyber threats such as suspicious user behavior or unrecognized network activity.

Improve Security Awareness Training

ChatGPT can bring a dynamic and interactive element to the training of security personnel by engaging them in conversational simulations.

Employees who are undergoing security awareness training can interact with the AI chatbot, ask questions, and receive immediate responses. The conversations can be tailored to simulate real-world security scenarios of potential threats like phishing attempts, social engineering attacks, or password security.

The chatbot can guide the trainees with appropriate response to such attacks. Not only does it serve as an educational tool, but also makes the training more engaging and effective.

Close the Knowledge Gap

In larger cybersecurity teams, knowledge gaps between lower-level staff and senior experts with higher skill sets can cause security concerns.

Low-level employees in IT and cybersecurity may come across complex situations that require expertise which is beyond their skill sets. ChatGPT effectively bridges this knowledge gap by acting as an accessible and knowledgeable mentor within the cybersecurity team. Have a detailed knowledge base database ready, and let ChatGPT access and analyze it to guide junior members of the security team.

Enhance Security with AI

Businesses and security experts should make the best use of AI to improve their security measures so that they can effectively combat attackers. AI and LLMs have both positive and negative impact in cybersecurity. We can’t prevent attackers from leveraging AI to their advantage. So it’s high time that organizations leverage AI themselves to combat today’s more sophisticated, AI-powered cyberthreats.