According to Canada’s top cybersecurity official, hackers and propagandists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to create malicious software, write convincing phishing emails, and spread disinformation online.
This week, Canadian Centre for Cyber Security Head Sami Khoury claimed his agency had seen AI used “in phishing emails, or crafting emails in a more focused way for Hacking & Misinformation
Khoury did not provide details or evidence, but his claim that cybercriminals were already employing AI adds urgency to the chorus of alarm over rogue actors’ use of AI.
In recent months, several cyber watchdog groups have warned about the hypothetical risks of AI, especially large language models (LLMs), which use massive amounts of text to create convincing dialogue, documents, and more.
In March, Europol reported that models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT allowed “to impersonate an organisation or individual in a highly realistic manner even with only a basic grasp of the English language.” The same month, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that criminals “might use LLMs to help with cyber attacks beyond their current capabilities.”
Cybersecurity experts have shown a range of potentially dangerous use cases, and some are now seeing suspected AI-generated content in the wild. A former hacker said he found an LLM educated on malicious content and instructed it to write a plausible cash transfer scam last week.
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AI for Hacking & Misinformation in a three-paragraph email, the LLM requested assistance with an urgent invoice.
“I understand this may be short notice,” stated the LLM, “but this payment is incredibly important and needs to be done in the next 24 hours.”
“There’s still a way to go because it takes a lot to write a good exploit,” Khoury said, but AI models were evolving so quickly that it was hard to assess their malicious potential before they were released into the wild.
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