Nation State Hackers Deploy AI

Uploaded on 2024-02-29 in FREE TO VIEW

Cyber security is undergoing a massive transformation with Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of this change, posing both a threat and an opportunity. AI has the potential to empower organisations to defeat cyberattacks at machine speed and drive innovation and efficiency in threat detection, hunting, and incident response.

However, adversaries can use AI as part of their exploits. It’s never been more critical for us to design, deploy, and use AI securely.

Now, Microsoft says it has detected threats from foreign countries that used or attempted to exploit generative AI it had developed. State-backed hackers from Russia, China, and Iran have been using tools from Microsoft-backed OpenAI to improve their skills, according to a recent Microsoft Report.

While computer users of all stripes have been experimenting with large language models to help with programming tasks, translate phishing emails and assemble attack plans, the new report is the first to associate top-tier government hacking teams with specific uses of the Large Language Model training technology used to create Generative AI. .

It’s also the first report on countermeasures and comes amid a continuing debate about the risks of the rapidly developing technology and efforts by many countries to put some limits on its use.

US adversaries, chiefly Iran and N. Korea, and to a lesser extent Russia and China, are beginning to use Generative Artificial Intelligence to mount or organise offensive cyber operations, Microsoft has recently said.

Microsoft said it detected and disrupted, in collaboration with business partner OpenAI, many threats that used or attempted to exploit AI technology they had developed.

In a blogpost the company said the techniques were “early-stage” and neither “particularly novel or unique” but that it was important to expose them publicly as US rivals leveraging large-language models to expand their ability to breach networks and conduct influence operations.

Cyber security firms have long used machine-learning on defence, principally to detect anomalous behaviour in networks. But criminals and offensive hackers use it as well, and the introduction of large-language models led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT upped that game of cat-and-mouse.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and it’s announcement coincided with its release of a report noting that generative AI is expected to enhance malicious social engineering, leading to more sophisticated deepfakes and voice cloning.

This is a threat to democracy in a year where over 50 countries will conduct elections, magnifying disinformation and already occurring.

Microsoft has provided some examples. In each case it said all generative AI accounts and assets of the named groups were disabled.

The North Korean cyber-espionage group known as Kimsuky has used the models to research foreign thinktanks that study the country, and to generate content likely to be used in spear-phishing hacking campaigns.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has used large-language models to assist in social engineering, in trouble-shooting software errors and even in studying how intruders might evade detection in a compromised network.

That includes generating phishing emails “including one pretending to come from an international development agency and another attempting to lure prominent feminists to an attacker-built website on feminism”. The AI helps accelerate and boost the email production.

The Russian GRU military intelligence unit known as Fancy Bear has used the models to research satellite and radar technologies that may relate to the war in Ukraine.

The Chinese cyber-espionage group known as Aquatic Panda – which targets a broad range of industries, higher education and governments from France to Malaysia – has interacted with the models “in ways that suggest a limited exploration of how LLMs can augment their technical operations”.

The Chinese group Maverick Panda, which has targeted US defence contractors amongst other sectors for more than a decade, had interactions with large-language models suggesting it was evaluating their effectiveness as a source of information “on potentially sensitive topics, high profile individuals, regional geopolitics, US influence, and internal affairs”.

In another blog OpenAI said its current GPT-4 model chatbot offers “only limited, incremental capabilities for malicious cybersecurity tasks beyond what is already achievable with publicly available, non-AI powered tools”.

Cyber Security Researchers Expect This To Change

Last April, the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, told Congress that “there are two epoch-defining threats and challenges. One is China, and the other is artificial intelligence.” Easterly said at the time that the US needed to ensure AI is built with security in mind.

Critics of the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 argue it was irresponsibly hasty, considering security was largely an afterthought in their development. “Of course bad actors are using large-language models – that decision was made when Pandora’s Box was opened,” said Amit Yoran, chief executive of the cyber security firm Tenable.

Some cybersecurity professionals complain about Microsoft’s creation and marketing of tools to address vulnerabilities in large-language models when it might more responsibly focus on making them more secure.

Former AT&T chief security officer Edward Amoroso has observed that while the use of AI and large-language models may not pose an immediately obvious threat, they “will eventually become one of the most powerful weapons in every nation-state military’s offense”.

Image: Unsplash

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