How Artificial Intelligence Will Make Cyber Criminals More 'Efficient'

The era of artificial intelligence is upon us, though there's plenty of debate over how AI should be defined much less whether we should start worrying about an apocalyptic robot uprising. The latter issue recently ignited a highly publicized dispute between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who argued that it was irresponsible to "try to drum up these doomsday scenarios". In the near-term however, it seems more than likely that AI will be weaponized by hackers in criminal organizations and governments to enhance now-familiar forms of cyberattacks like identity theft and DDoS attacks. A recent survey has found that a majority of cybersecurity professionals believe that artificial intelligence will be used to power cyberattacks in the coming year. Cybersecurity firm Cylance conducted the survey at this year's Black Hat USA conference and found that 62 percent of respondents believe that "there is high possibility that AI could be used by hackers for offensive purposes."