The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly common in many different industries and fields, from healthcare to finance to transportation. While the potential benefits of AI are vast and numerous, it's important to also consider the potential drawbacks and negative uses of this technology. One area where AI is increasingly being utilized is in the realm of cybercrime. One way that AI is used in cybercrime is through the development of sophisticated malware. This type of software is designed to infect a computer or network without the user's knowledge and can cause significant damage or disruption.

Like any other shrewd businesspeople, cyber-criminals work with many of the same financial models of reducing risk and exposure while maximizing profitability as the organizations they seek to exploit. Attack techniques are evaluated not only in terms of their effectiveness, but in the overhead required to develop, modify, and implement them. To better defend themselves, organizations are adopting AI and machine learning to automate tedious and time-consuming activities that normally require a high degree of human supervision and intervention to increase visibility and response time, as well as to accelerate critical security functions such as threat detection and response. As these newer defensive strategies are implemented, they impact the basic economic and ROI models of cyber-criminals. Four Emerging Security Threats The evolution of zero-days: The rapidly increasing variety and number of vulnerabilities and exploits is likely to be augmented by the ability to quickly produce zero-day exploits and provide them as a service.

The last 12 months has seen an exponential growth in the volume and sophistication of cyber-crime. Whether it be ransomware, social engineering, or credential compromise, hackers are more determined than ever to target businesses and institutions as the pandemic leaves them more vulnerable than ever. Businesses are doing everything they can to combat cyber-attacks, but it's difficult to foresee what new campaigns will arise and how they'll work. It's even more difficult to predict what the next significant threat will be. The Zeus trojan and Locky ransomware were once major threats, but now it's various botnets, the Trickbot trojan, and various ransomware families like Ryuk, Cerber and SamSam.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be one of the most influential and game-changing technology advancements in the business world. As more and more enterprises go digital, companies all over the globe are constantly engineering new ways to implement AI-based functions into practically every platform and software tool at their disposal. As a natural consequence, however, cybercriminals too are on the rise, and view the increasing digitization of business as wide open window of opportunity. It should come as no surprise, then, that AI is affecting cybersecurity – but it's affecting it in both positive and negative ways. Cybersecurity Ventures' Official 2019 Annual cybercrime Report predicts cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021 – up from $3 trillion in 2015.

Amidst the advancing technology, cybercrime is skyrocketing. In fact, the world is projected to spend $6 trillion to control the increasing cybercrime. By 2025, the amount could reach $10.5 trillion. Now more than ever, there is a need for companies to safeguard their assets from cybercriminals. Unfortunately, most of them overlook threat detection. For this reason, threats, especially those targeting the source, affect the entire network because they are undetected.