What Will Cyber Attacks Look Like In The Future?

I am a relative newbie to the cybersecurity world, having spent the majority of my career focused within FinTech (payments and banking). The cybersecurity industry is a fascinating one, and very much key to the strategic priorities of CIO's and security teams. This is magnified even further given the recent spate of attacks we've seen in the last few years.

I have written and contributed to a number of articles around AI, and it's the use of AI algorithms where we're starting to see this shift with cyber attacks and it's an obvious evolution.

Could AI be used as a cyber weapon?

It's an intriguing thought. It's also not beyond the realms of possibility, the debate goes on but these algorithms could use their intelligence to learn about businesses. Cyber attacks will be become more and more sophisticated, utilisation of AI and deep learning technologies will become the norm. The traditional cybersecurity methods available today won't know how to cope with new attacks carried out by so-called smart machines.

How would we try and prevent this? If it were to happen how would we cope?

The majority of cyber attacks today are targeted at specific groups, companies or individuals, usually for extortion purposes or just plain annoyance. The latter of these two is usually to prove a point to enterprises - specifically tier one MNC's. They are typically autonomous in nature, usually they build up steady control of data before consuming networks and endpoints. The numbers have soared in recent years, a trend I expect to continue with more sophistication as we move through time.

How will attacks become more sophisticated?

The term "deep learning' has worked its way into the business world over the last several years. It's used broadly in conversation which is focused on AI, data and analytics in particular. However, it's an approach to AI which has gotten most of the attention and has shown great promise, specifically in developing autonomous self-learning systems which are revolutionising many industries.

Autonomous cyber attacks could evolve to be able to self-learn, meaning that they're beyond anyone's control, they will have their own decision making capabilities and be buried deep within networks. With all of this in mind, the damage will be slow, painful and these attacks will be difficult to trace.

The Future

We have to be mindful of the power of new technologies we're adopting to help improve efficiencies, operational tasks and customer experience. You only have to look at the number of AI assistant's that are available, these could easily be taken over by malicious users. Cyber attacks, warfare will always sadly be part of our everyday lives, but the level of sophistication being employed by these individuals or groups carrying out these attacks is scary.

I don't have an answer as to how this could be tackled, but certainly it's food for thought.