Artificial intelligence is making its mark, allowing businesses to produce reasonably good content or service improvements quickly. Automating operations that once required human intervention or brainpower is now a breeze. However, as expected, hostile actors can also take advantage of this.
Read on for why businesses like yours need to understand how quick AI development puts security and privacy at risk.
Why Is AI Growing So Rapidly?
Artificial intelligence is the latest technological phenomenon, taking multiple industries by storm. AI is the result of computer science initiatives aiming to create “intelligent” programs. AI learns as it performs different tasks, most of which used to be the responsibility of real people.
How are businesses using AI? While doctors rely on these systems to diagnose patients, retailers use them to operate chatbots and provide around-the-clock customer service for online shoppers. The potential for AI and machine learning is impressive but not bulletproof.
How AI “Learns”
AI tools learn through data. For example, customer service chatbots use a large language model that analyzes online conversations. From there, each analyzed conversation develops the program’s ability to converse in a similar way.
Data trains and improves the AI system. However, the same information also allows hostile actors to pursue their own malicious endeavors.
Fast AI Development: Putting Security and Privacy at Risk
A recent report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology informed us about how fast AI development puts security and privacy at risk. To summarize the report, hostile actors are using four main types of attacks to confuse AI systems and get what they want:
Evasion Attacks
Hostile actors employ evasion attacks after the training and deployment of an AI system to interrupt the system’s response. For instance, an attacker may draw a stop sign to confuse an automated car. Since AI-driven vehicles only understand what a real stop sign is supposed to look like, additional markings like numbers could make the car think it is a speed sign.
Poisoning Attacks
Hostile actors can corrupt the data programmers use to train large language models. For example, attackers could corrupt the conversations used to train AI systems.
Data Privacy Attacks
A data privacy attack steals sensitive information, like personal data, from an AI system. They may interact with a chatbot, asking strategic questions for specific answers. They could also reverse engineer the training model in an attempt to access private information.
Abuse Attacks
Abuse attacks target legitimate sources that AI systems use to gather information. By altering this content, attackers deploy incorrect information to twist the AI system’s intended behavior.
So, How Can You Protect Security and Privacy From the Growing Threat?
In reality, protection against these cybersecurity risks is still virtually non-existent. So, since artificial intelligence is finding its way into nearly every industry, your business will need to be highly cautious about AI deployment initiatives. Fast AI development risks security and privacy, so why not test the water first?
