The Growing AI/Cyber Nexus

While the debate about artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality rages, virtual terrorists – those who operate primarily on the Dark Web – are getting smarter and thinking of new ways to benefit from both, creating methods to operate autonomously in this brave new world. Malware is being designed with adaptive, success-based learning to improve the accuracy and efficacy of cyberattacks. The coming generation of malware will be situation-aware, meaning that it will understand the environment it is in and make calculated decisions about what to do next, behaving like a human attacker: performing reconnaissance, identifying targets, choosing methods of attack, and intelligently evading detection. This next generation of malware uses code that is a precursor to AI, replacing traditional "if not this, then that" code logic with more complex decision-making trees. Autonomous malware operates much like branch prediction technology, designed to guess which branch of a decision tree a transaction will take before it is executed.