Imagine getting to a courthouse and seeing paper signs stuck to the doors with the message "Systems down." What about police officers in the field unable to access information on laptops in their vehicles, or surgeries delayed in hospitals? That's what can happen to a city, police department, or hospital in a ransomware attack. Ransomware is malicious software that can encrypt or control computer systems. Criminals who launch these attacks can then refuse to return access until they get paid.

AI-enabled malware could soon be the newest weapon in the threat actors' arsenal, a recent report from Malwarebytes warned. Malwarebytes described AI-enabled malware and cyberattacks as threats that utilize machine learning and AI to find vulnerable systems, evade detection from security products and enhance social engineering techniques. While there are currently no examples of AI-enabled malware in the wild, the report said, it "would be better equipped to familiarize itself with its environment before it strikes," according to the report. "We are talking about how AI-enabled malware can be harder to detect," said Adam Kujawa, director of Malwarebytes Labs. "It could deliver more targeted malware, create better spearfishing campaigns, because it's able to collect big data from social media, and [create more convincing] fake news and clickbait."

A year ago, network security specialists spotted a worrying new trend: hackers began unleashing ransomware attacks on really big targets--America's cities. Atlanta, Baltimore, and Greenville, N.C. would later grind to a halt after devastating computer outages disrupted everything from the collection of parking tickets to the sale of new homes. The next big thing that keeps computer scientist Adam Kujawa up at night? Ransomware powered by artificial intelligence, a development that could give exploits such as RobbinHood and WannaCry a potent new makeover to evade cyber defenses, burrow into computer networks and wreak mayhem. In recent years, artificial intelligence and machine learning have been a godsend to IT security professionals, enabling them to detect malware sooner--even the moment it enters the wild--keeping networks more secure and corporate assets safer. But the same technologies that are supercharging network defenses could become a powerfully destructive counter-threat in the wrong hands, experts warn.

Companies have to defend against all attacks, while the attackers only have to get through once. And it's about to get much, much worse. The same artificial intelligence technologies used to power speech recognition, self-driving cars, and "deep fake" videos have the potential to be turned to other uses, like creating viruses that morph faster than antivirus companies can keep up, phishing emails that are indistinguishable from real messages written by humans, and intelligently going after a data center's entire perimeter to find the smallest vulnerability and then use it to burrow in. "We already know that a skilled and determined human attacker is the most difficult to catch," said Ryan Shaw, co-founder at Bionic, a Washington, DC-based cybersecurity startup. "However, much like defenders, our adversaries have a scaling problem -- there is only so much time and skill to go around."