5 Risks That A.I. Can Pose To Your Company

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a tool widely used by companies to improve various sectors, including the sector responsible for cyber security. However, artificial intelligence can also pose a risk: the rise of AI as a tool for cyber scams represents a new and complex threat to companies and their employees. Faced with this scenario, it is essential that organizations and employees adopt good cybersecurity practices to protect themselves against attacks.

Small Businesses Also Targeted by Cybercrime

Although we often think that only large organizations are susceptible to cyber attacks, according to Cybersecurity Ventures:

• 50% of cyber attacks in the world target small businesses.
• 60% of these companies close their business within six months of suffering a cyber attack.

The data above shows how devastating the impact of these attacks on small businesses can be. That’s why it’s essential to adopt good cybersecurity practices to protect data and systems, regardless of the size of the organization.

What Risks A.I. May Pose to Your Company?

When it comes to cyber security in companies, Artificial Intelligence can help in a number of ways, such as optimizing the analysis of large volumes of data and developing better security systems that can identify possible cyber threats.

• 63% of security professionals believe that AI has great potential to improve cyber protection measures, according to a survey carried out by the Cloud Security Alliance, commissioned by Google.

• Around 55% of companies worldwide planned to implement artificial intelligence as a strategy to strengthen cyber security last year.

Despite the benefits to digital security, Artificial Intelligence can also pose major risks to organizations, whether small, medium or large. Below are the 5 main risks associated with the use of Artificial Intelligence that could threaten your company’s cyber security:

Malware Generation

Artificial Intelligence tools, including ChatGPT, have programming skills and are able to develop effective codes, even though they may contain errors. Even so, AI tools can aid and speed up the development of malicious applications and software, such as malware. This is due to gaps that can still be found in these tools and exploited by criminals.

Discrimination and Prejudice

Unfortunately, AI algorithms can be created with biased and discriminatory data sets. If this is the case, these algorithms can reinforce discriminatory practices and prejudices. As an example, we can mention facial recognition systems that can have their algorithms trained only with images of certain ethnic and/or demographic groups. Thus, the use of AI is also a cybersecurity concern when it comes to ethics.

Lack of Transparency and Data Interpretation

Artificial Intelligence can effectively identify patterns and make decisions based on analyzed data. But some models used by AI systems lack transparency or interpretability. This makes it more difficult to identify errors and negative trends, for example in the case of corrupted data that ends up being incorporated, which can compromise the system’s reliability and credibility.

Sensitive Data Breach

To be trained, AI models need large volumes of data. However, this data can contain sensitive information about customers, businesses and other sensitive information about the organization itself. As a result, there is a risk that sensitive data will be breached and exploited by attackers, making it easier for criminals to carry out scams. This can completely compromise and damage the company financially and morally.

Outsourced AI Models

Due to the complexity that the process of training AI models requires, many companies opt to use AI models developed by third parties. However, this practice can pose a great risk: it increases the possibility of attackers targeting the companies that provide this type of service and develop the models. Attackers can then corrupt the models by inserting malicious training data or other forms of intrusion. Therefore, it is important to have caution when adopting this practice, since the risk of a cyber attack is big for the company that develops the AI model and for the organization that uses it, and could compromise the cyber security of both.

Conclusion

Although it is one of the main allies in the day-to-day running of companies, Artificial Intelligence can pose risks, especially if organizations do not have their data properly protected and qualified. For this reason, it is essential that the training data is secure and accurate so that the models are more reliable.

In addition, it is very important to raise awareness among all the company’s team and employees of the risks that Artificial Intelligence can pose to the organization’s cyber security. This makes it easier for possible breaches and threats to be identified and protective measures to be adopted.