Combating Cyber Threats In The Age Of AI

Uploaded on 2025-02-07 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW

Despite ongoing efforts to stop cybercriminals and their ever-changing, inventive techniques, research shows that cybercrime is expected to cost $12 trillion in 2025. The proliferation of AI-powered tools has significantly contributed to the advancements in the way that cybercriminals trick individuals and businesses to ascertain sensitive information, exposing them to threats that are also more sophisticated than before.

Cybercriminals are utilising AI tools to aid their attacks and more easily avoid suspicion, making it more difficult for businesses to stop them in their tracks.

Rapidly Changing Landscape

The growing awareness of tactics that cyber criminals use made it historically easier to spot certain attacks. However, as cybercrime becomes more organised, businesses face more sophisticated threats from highly structured syndicates who use AI to optimise their attacks. AI now plays a significant role in how cyberattacks are planned, executed, amplified, and repeated. This helps cybercriminals be quicker and more adaptive.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is one of the leading tactics where cybercriminals are looking to AI for help, impersonating employees to commit financial fraud. Verifying identities and granting access once is no longer sufficient. To lower the danger of fraud and identity theft, this needs to be done at every interaction through stringent identity verification measures to mitigate the risk of fraud and impersonation.

Phishing and social engineering have experienced major advancements using AI as well. In addition to writing emails and texts, cybercriminals utilise AI to make themselves sound authentic by altering their vocabulary, tone of voice, and style. Bad actors can even customise attacks using data that is publicly accessible or information that they supply.

Fighting AI With AI

The fact that cybercriminals have taken to AI means only one thing: businesses need to do the same. As AI becomes more widely used and advanced, using the same weapons is the only way to fight back.

By integrating AI into practical and scalable solutions, businesses can enhance security, heighten productivity, and future-proof technology investments. This starts with implementing additional layers of protection, including:

Rapid anomaly detection to identify identity- and privilege-related anomalies to safeguard critical assets.

Context-based risk scoring to deliver insightful, context-aware assessments to enable teams to prioritize the most pressing risks.

Natural Language Querying (NLQ) to surface insights, simplify complex investigations, and turn data into actionable intelligence.

These layers serve as vital measures that protect credentials and identities from threats powered by AI, while enabling security teams to shift from reactive to proactive cybersecurity measures. By making sure that only the appropriate people have access to sensitive information at the appropriate times, intelligent authorisation plays a critical role in regulating the link between identity and data security.

Businesses must, however, swiftly create plans that evaluate both the present and future potential hazards posed by AI. This calls for a flexible and dynamic security plan that can change rapidly. Organisations can no longer depend on slow, static manual and human-first security procedures, which gradually reduce security effectiveness. They must put in place measures and policies that are flexible enough to adjust to new risks as the usage of AI in cybercrime increases.

Security platforms offer this kind of value by introducing new algorithms and activating new features in real-time to guarantee that companies have the security they need and want.

Additionally, companies need to protect their infrastructure against AI-powered attacks while also reducing the risks associated with utilising their own AI technologies, including agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), algorithms, and data sets. Non-human identities are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals, and they must be protected using the same stringent identity security measures as human identities.

The Future Of Cybersecurity

While AI is still evolving, organisations are hesitant to fully entrust it with autonomous decision-making, especially in high-risk scenarios. Businesses are more comfortable using it when the potential consequences are less tangible, suggesting a need to build trust and address concerns about AI's reliability and transparency first.

As AI becomes increasingly more embedded in day-to-day operations, cybersecurity teams in 2025 will be utilising AI to create AI assistants to help them combat these threats. These assistants will be able to provide context, clarity and transparency that will enable cybersecurity teams to make faster decisions and lead to faster recovery.

One thing is certain. Organisations must remain alert and take precautions as AI continues to cause waves in cybercrime. Future-proofing cybersecurity methods with AI in mind will be crucial as businesses navigate the growing number of cyber threats. AI-enabled crime is not going anywhere.

Phil Calvin is Chief Product Officer at Delinea

Image: gorodenkoff

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