Malicious AI refers to the use of AI and machine learning to augment offensive cyber-attacks, enabling adversaries to launch highly targeted and sophisticated attack campaigns at greater speed and scale than ever before. AI will supercharge the mission on multiple fronts, creating stealthier, faster and more effective attacks which blend into normal background activity, and which are almost impossible to counter using traditional security controls. In the face of malicious AI, only defensive AI can meaningfully fight back. Autonomous Response technology leverages AI to generate surgical responses to in-progress cyber-attacks as soon as they appear. Malicious AI refers to the use of AI and machine learning to augment offensive cyber-attacks, enabling adversaries to launch highly targeted and sophisticated attack campaigns at greater speed and scale than ever before.

Malicious AI refers to the use of AI and machine learning to augment offensive cyber-attacks, enabling adversaries to launch highly targeted and sophisticated attack campaigns at greater speed and scale than ever before. AI will supercharge the mission on multiple fronts, creating stealthier, faster and more effective attacks which blend into normal background activity, and which are almost impossible to counter using traditional security controls. In the face of malicious AI, only defensive AI can meaningfully fight back. Autonomous Response technology leverages AI to generate surgical responses to in-progress cyber-attacks as soon as they appear. Today, Autonomous Response responds to a cyber-threat somewhere in the world every 2 seconds.

No matter the generation, we all know some of the storied battles that have withstood the test of time. With AI projected to become a $190 billion industry by 2025 (according to Markets and Markets), it is more integrated in our everyday lives than we may even notice at this stage – and it continues to gain popularity. AI has found its way into home appliances, medical imagery, natural language processing and even musical composition. One area that AI has remained a constant is cybersecurity, where its continual learnings help detect and combat cyberthreats. But what if this technology were to fall into the wrong hands?

Have you ever matched with someone on a dating app that seems'too good to be true'? They may well be, according to an online dating consultant. Scammers have been letting'malicious bots' loose on dating apps in an attempt to convince people to part with their money, says online dating expert Steve Dean. He warned against'people' who open chats with'here's my phone number, you can call me here' with a link as soon as you swipe them on Tinder. Often these links take you to a scamming or live webcam site.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to gain a foothold in our everyday lives. Whether for complex tasks like computer vision and natural language processing, or something as basic as an online chatbot, their popularity shows no signs of slowing. Companies have also started to explore deep learning, which is an advanced subset of machine learning. By applying "deep neural networks" deep learning takes inspiration from how the human brain works. Unlike machine learning, deep learning can actually train its processes directly on raw data, requiring little to no human intervention.

With damage related to cybercrime projected to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021, enterprises are putting more emphasis than ever on securing their digital and organizational assets. While rudimentary machine learning has played a role in cyber threats for some years, today there's talk of the looming threat of malicious AI: AI-powered cyber-attacks capable of causing massive damage worldwide without the involvement of human operators. To better understand the threats and opportunities presented by AI in the cyber security space, we went to the AI Summit San Francisco to catch up with Justin Fier, director of cyber intelligence and analytics at Darktrace – the company putting AI to work on cyber defense. Justin's background is in the US intelligence community, and today works with Darktrace's global customers on threat analysis, defensive cyber operations, IoT security, and machine learning. What are the key takeaways from your AI Summit keynote?

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."

What that suggested to the researchers is that in every data set, there are two types of correlations: patterns that actually correlate with the meaning of the data, such as the whiskers in a cat image or the fur colorations in a panda image, and patterns that happen to exist within the training data but do not generalize to other contexts. These latter "misleading" correlations, as we'll call them, are the ones exploited in adversarial attacks. In the diagram above, for example, the attack takes advantage of a pixel pattern falsely correlated with gibbons by burying those imperceptible pixels within the panda image. The recognition system, trained to recognize the misleading pattern, then picks up on it and assumes it's looking at a gibbon.

AI is known as a "dual use" technology – that is, it can be used both for good applications as well as harmful ones. AI is already starting to be used to threaten companies in ways that we haven't seen before. In this infographic, Cognilytica highlights some of the concerns and new threats that AI brings into the picture.

WATERLOO – An exciting wave of tech industry investment is set to make Kitchener-Waterloo the Canadian hub of creating an uncontrollable line of code that goes on to wreak incalculable economic and human damage. "AI is the future, and it's important for Canada to be part of that future," said Prime Minister Trudeau. "Even if that future includes the complete destruction of all life on earth." While some experts worry that the increasing integration of tech into the realms of economics, policing, personal finance, transit, health, and parenting, exponentially increases the ability of rogue code to create human suffering, other experts are paid a lot to design it, and say that things will'probably be fine'. "On our current course, it's inevitable that some country will invent a piece of AI with the power to destroy the world in the next 20 years," said Trudeau.