You answer a random call from a family member, and they breathlessly explain how there's been a horrible car accident. They need you to send money right now, or they'll go to jail. You can hear the desperation in their voice as they plead for an immediate cash transfer. While it sure sounds like them, and the call came from their number, you feel like something's off. So, you decide to hang up and call them right back.

The list of concerns around the use of artificial intelligence seems to grow with every passing week. Issues around bias, the use of AI for deepfake videos and audio, misinformation, governmental surveillance, security and failure of the technology to properly identify the simplest of objects have created a cacophony of concern about the technology's long-term future. One software company recently released a study which showed only 25% of consumers would trust a decision made by systems using AI, and another report commissioned by KPMG International found that a mere 35% of information technology leaders had a high level of trust in their own organizations' analytics. It's a bumpy journey for AI as the technology world embarks on a new decade and key practitioners in the space are well aware that trust will ultimately determine how widely and quickly the technology becomes adopted throughout the world. "We want to build an ecosystem of trust," Francesca Rossi, AI ethics global leader at IBM Corp., said at the digital EmTech Digital conference on Monday.

Given the proliferation of high-profile attacks in 2019, the security outlook for next year--and the next decade--is filled with potential pitfalls, as challenges persist in maintaining the security profile in enterprises, particularly as security operations teams are spread thinner as attack surfaces widen. SEE: Special report: The cloud v. data center decision (free PDF) (TechRepublic) McAfee CTO Steve Grobman and Director of Engineering Liz Maida--who joined the company through their acquisition of Uplevel Security, a firm that applied graph theory and machine learning to security data--spoke to TechRepublic about the security forecast for 2020. In contrast to spray-and-pray attacks, relying on port scanning to uncover low-hanging vulnerabilities, an increase in attacks targeting specific industries are anticipated to continue their rise in popularity. "We've seen a good number of ransomware campaigns where the adversaries have done reconnaissance to really understand the critical assets [and] the defenses, and then tailor the attack in order to get into that environment, to demand a higher payment from the victim," Grobman said. "That really requires a much more sophisticated level of defense for the defenders. The other point that I'd make is...we see the evolution of attacks from just focusing on traditional compute environments, to also focusing on cloud environments. Given that many organizations are shifting key components of their operations into the cloud, it would be natural that adversaries are looking for ways to not only target traditional environments, but also cloud assets," Grobman said.

Security firm McAfee has warned that it's more likely humans will use AI for malicious purposes rather than it going rogue itself. It's become a cliché metaphor, but people are still concerned a self-thinking killer AI like SkyNet from the film Terminator will be created. McAfee CTO Steve Grobman spoke at this year's RSA conference in San Francisco and warned the wrong humans in control of powerful AIs are his company's primary concern. To provide an example of how AIs could be used for good or bad purposes, Grobman handed over to McAfee Chief Data Scientist Dr Celeste Fralick. Fralick explained how McAfee has attempted to predict crime in San Francisco using historic data combined with a machine learning model.

You can no longer believe what you see. Deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to make people appear to say and do things in videos that they haven't said or done, have been growing more realistic at an alarming rate. And it's a matter of time before they're used to try to circumvent cybersecurity. Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm McAfee, and Celeste Fralick, chief data scientist, warned in a keynote speech at the RSA security conference in San Francisco that the tech has reached the point where you can barely tell with the naked eye whether a video is fake or real. They showed a video where Fralick's words were coming out of a video of Grobman's face, even though Grobman never said those words.

That was among the takeaways from the Tuesday morning keynote sessions here at RSA 2019. "AI is the new foundation for our entire industry, it will enable us to better defend ourselves, to better detect threats, to out-innovate our adversaries, to solve other key issues," said Steve Grobman, CTO of McAfee. "But we have to ask, are we looking at AI objectively? We cannot only focus on the potential, we must also understand the limitations and how it will be used against us." Grobman continued with an example of work McAfee did in taking public safety data sets about crime and with 50 lines of python and machine learning to predict whether a crime would be committed in a specific region of the city based on certain parameters.

If 2017 taught us anything, it's that you can't be complacent about your cybersecurity strategy. And as the driving force behind McAfee's security research and development, you'd expect Chief Technology Officer, Steve Grobman, to have more to worry about than most. "You could spend all day being concerned about almost anything," he laughs, when I ask him what threats people should be looking out for. But there is one big issue facing all companies today. How do you deal with the fast-changing threat landscape whilst continuing to protect yourself against the threats you were worried about yesterday?

Disciplines such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing increasingly important role in cyber security, but not at the expense of human intellect. This is one of the key messages from the first day of McAfee MPOWER, the company's annual security conference in Las Vegas. Indeed, one of the company's two new product launches, Investigator, has this complementary approach of human and machine at its very heart. "I think cyber security is a fundamentally different field to many other areas where artificial intelligence, machine learning is being used, Grobman said. "The example I like to give is weather forecasting [because] as we get better at forecasting weather, the laws of physics don't get upset and decide to change the way water evaporates.

Machine learning is an important part of artificial intelligence and everything that goes with it these days when it comes to creating new tech and reliable automated processes. But as a certain experiment by TheNextWeb contributor and cybersecurity expert Steve Grobman will demonstrate, humans will still be valuable for some time when it comes to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence in general. This simple process should explain things quite nicely. Grobman previously decided he would get into the world of machine learning to dabble in the field by creating models to predict the winner of the Super Bowl. One model was trained on 14 years' worth of team data from the years stretching from 1996 to 2010.

Artificial technology may escalate a long-running arms race between financial institutions and cybercriminals. The technology is helping banks' cybersecurity teams detect and deal with breaches. Unfortunately, AI also creates new vulnerabilities in systems, since leaving machines in charge opens up opportunities for mistakes and manipulation. Further, AI helps attackers do their jobs more efficiently. For example, in attacks carried out last year, the writers of the Petya malware used AI to identify vulnerabilities and scan millions of ports in seconds to find the holes.