Using AI to play cat-and-mouse in cyberdefence

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is very much in the news. Recently, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was surprised to hear a recording of his own voice produced by a deep fake program. A Japanese AI expert had trained the program for two hours to mimic the way Kishida sounds, including his tone and pitch of voice, the media reported.

This was just an experiment. But the possibility of a deep fake voice impersonating the Japanese prime minister, or any other world leader, is worrying.

Deep fakes are just one way hackers are using AI to gain access to networks, systems, and data. Other AI techniques, such as machine learning and natural language processing, enable hackers to find new vulnerabilities faster and more efficiently. AI quickly scans vast data and identifies patterns, enabling hackers to develop new ways of accessing confidential data that were once thought to be impossible or too difficult to access.