Chatbots are taking away a key line of defence against fraudulent phishing emails by removing glaring grammatical and spelling errors, according to experts. The warning comes as policing organisation Europol issues an international advisory about the potential criminal use of ChatGPT and other "large language models". Phishing emails are a well-known weapon of cybercriminals and fool recipients into clicking on a link that downloads malicious software or tricks them into handing over personal details such as passwords or pin numbers. Half of all adults in England and Wales reported receiving a phishing email last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, while UK businesses have identified phishing attempts as the most common form of cyber-threat. However, a basic flaw in some phishing attempts – poor spelling and grammar – is being rectified by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which can correct the errors that trip spam filters or alert human readers.

It's one thing to tell organizations that artificial intelligence (AI) can spot patterns and shut down attacks better, faster, or even just more effectively than what human security analysts are capable of. It's completely a different thing to get both business leaders and security teams comfortable with the idea of giving more control and more visibility over to AI technology. One way to accomplish that is to let people try it out in a controlled environment and see what's possible, says Max Heinemeyer, director of threat hunting at Darktrace. This isn't a process that can be rushed, Heinemeyer says. Building up trust takes time.

Darktrace plans to expand its AI-powered security offerings to include attack prevention by the end of 2021, the company told VentureBeat. On Tuesday, executives from the company described plans for upcoming product updates that will expand the Darktrace portfolio to include proactive security AI capabilities, joining the company's detection and response technologies. The upcoming launch of "prevent" capabilities will extend Darktrace "into the offensive area for the first time ever," said Nicole Eagan, chief strategy officer and AI officer at Darktrace, while speaking at the virtual Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit -- Americas conference on Tuesday. In a statement provided to VentureBeat, Eagan said that "development of this breakthrough innovation known as our'prevent' capability is on track, and we expect this to be released to early adopters by the end of this calendar year." Founded in 2013, the Cambridge, U.K.-based firm went public in April and now has a market capitalization of $4.25 billion.

Over the past year, the sheer number of Ransomware attacks have increased dramatically, with organizations of all stripes being affected: government entities, educational institutions, healthcare facilities, retailers, and even agricultural groups. While the bulk of the media attention has been on critical infrastructure and large organizations, attackers are not limiting themselves to just those types of victims. "That's really just the tip of the iceberg," says Max Heinemeyer, director of threat hunting at Darktrace. "We see not just big names being hit. It's basically any company where adversaries think they can pay the ransom. Anybody who's got money and running some kind of digital business is basically in the crosshairs."

Over the past year, the sheer number of ransomware attacks have increased dramatically, with organizations of all stripes being affected: government entities, educational institutions, healthcare facilities, retailers, and even agricultural groups. While the bulk of the media attention has been on critical infrastructure and large organizations, attackers are not limiting themselves to just those types of victims. "That's really just the tip of the iceberg," says Max Heinemeyer, director of threat hunting at Darktrace. "We see not just big names being hit. It's basically any company where adversaries think they can pay the ransom. Anybody who's got money and running some kind of digital business is basically in the crosshairs."

Three decades after a US university student called Robert Tappan Morris was convicted of launching the first widely known malware attack on the internet, cybercrime has become big business, costing the global economy an estimated £2.1m a minute. Internet service provider Beaming reports that cybercriminals are launching increasingly sophisticated attacks on an "unprecedented scale". The pandemic has exacerbated the situation because it has prompted a sharp rise in remote working, which has enabled them to target vulnerabilities in domestic internet connections to attack corporate systems. In 2020, the average UK business faced 686,961 attempts to breach its systems – 20% up on the previous year's figure – according to Beaming. That equates to an attack every 46 seconds.

Artificial intelligence is also on the advance in IT security. According to a survey of 300 managers, 96 percent reported preparations in their companies for AI-supported IT attacks. In doing so, they partly rely on the help of "defensive AI". The survey was carried out with the assistance of the AI cybersecurity provider Darktrace. A survey of around 200 IT managers in medium-sized companies came to a more differentiated result.

Security leaders are increasingly turning to AI and ML-based defenses against cyberattacks as pessimism grows over the efficacy of human-based cybersecurity defense efforts. A recent survey from MIT Technology Review Insights, sponsored by Darktrace, found more than half of business leaders think security strategies based on human-led responses to fast-moving attacks are failing; nearly all have begun to bolster their defenses in preparation for AI-enabled attacks. "Cyber AI autonomously stops threats in their tracks and surfaces relevant information in a digestible narrative, augmenting human teams and giving them time to focus on strategic tasks that matter," said Darktrace's director of threat hunting, Max Heinemeyer. "All that organizations can do to prepare is simply embrace self-learning AI as a force multiplier." He noted that AI-powered cybersecurity platforms can integrate with other tools in a security toolbox, ingest new forms of telemetry from existing investments for further enrichment, share detections and incidents with workflow tools and even orchestrate response actions across the rest of the digital estate, for example, by integrating with preventative tools.

In many ways, cybersecurity has always been a contest; vendors race to develop security products that can identify and mitigate any threats, while cybercriminals aim to develop malware and exploits capable of bypassing protections. With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), however, this combative exchange between attackers and defenders is about to become more complex and increasingly ferocious. According to Max Heinemeyer, Director of Threat Hunting at AI security firm Darktrace, it is only a matter of time before AI is co-opted by malicious actors to automate attacks and expedite the discovery of vulnerabilities. "We don't know precisely when offensive AI will begin to emerge, but it could already be happening behind closed doors," he told TechRadar Pro. "If we are able to [build complex AI products] here in our labs with a few researchers, imagine what nation states that invest heavily in cyberwar could be capable of." When this trend starts to play out, as seems inevitable, Heinemeyer says cybersecurity will become a "battle of the algorithms", with AI pitted against AI.

In early March 2020, UK artificial intelligence (AI) security startup Darktrace was able to contain the spread of a sophisticated attack by Chinese cyber espionage and cyber crime group APT41 exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Zoho ManageEngine. In a blog post describing the attack, Max Heinemeyer, director of threat hunting at Darktrace, wrote: "Without public indicators of compromise (IoCs) or any open source intelligence available, targeted attacks are incredibly difficult to detect. Even the best detections are useless if they cannot be actioned by a security analyst at an early stage. Too often, this occurs because of an overwhelming volume of alerts, or simply because the skills barrier to triage and investigation is too high." Heinemeyer says Darktrace's Cyber AI platform was able to detect the subtle signs of this targeted, unknown attack at an early stage, without relying on prior knowledge.