HC3 Shares Tips for Defending Against AI-Enhanced Cyberattacks
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT can be used as virtual assistants, for customer support, quickly retrieving and summarizing information, and automating repetitive administrative tasks. As such they have tremendous potential in many industries, including healthcare. While there are considerable advantages to AI-based tools, they can also be misused by malicious actors, and there is growing evidence that cyber actors are using these tools to speed up and scale their attacks.
This week, the HHS Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) published a brief on AI, the threat AI-powered tools pose to the health sector, and mitigations healthcare organizations can implement to ensure their security strategies evolve to deal with AI-based threats. Tools such as ChatGPT have controls in place to prevent abuse by malicious actors; however, it is possible to circumvent those protections with ease. Artificial Intelligence tools are already being used by malicious actors to accelerate malware and ransomware development and create more complex code that is capable of evading security solutions. AI tools are being used to automate attacks, exploit unpatched vulnerabilities more rapidly, perform deeper reconnaissance of targets, and develop hard-to-detect phishing emails and impersonation attacks.
HC3 demonstrated the ease at which tools such as ChatGPT can be leveraged by malicious actors by creating phishing email templates with perfect spelling and grammar along with convincing lures to trick recipients into opening malicious attachments or clicking hyperlinks to malicious web pages. The emails can easily be customized for highly targeted attacks and customization can be automated for conducting attacks at scale.
Threat actors can also use ChatGPT to write valid malware code. HC3 provides an example of how Hyas created malware code based on leaked BlackMamba code to create malware that is able to repeatedly mutate to evade security solutions. The researchers posed as legitimate security researchers to get around OpenAI’s ethics filters to create the code. AI-based tools such as ChatGPT can be used by threat actors with little technical skill to create malware, opening up attacks to a much broader range of cybercriminals while helping sophisticated cybercriminals automate the creation of different parts of the infection chain.
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Defending against the malicious use of artificial intelligence tools can be a challenge for healthcare organizations. HC3 recommends using the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the MITRE Atlas knowledgebase of adversary tactics, techniques, and case studies for machine learning (ML) systems, and adopting AI-based tools for defense, including penetration testing, threat detection, threat analysis, and incident response, and to provide AI training for cybersecurity personnel. It may not be possible to prevent the malicious use of AI by cyber threat actors but AI-educated users and AI-enhanced systems will be much more adept at detecting AI-enhanced threats.
