Artificial Intelligence: What Is on the Horizon?
The cybersecurity industry is under immense pressure as digital threats continue to increase and evolve. Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely understood to be a critical next step for optimizing cybersecurity processes and functions and enabling security operations centers (SOCs) to keep pace. Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT will play a leading role as SOCs find innovative ways to tap their potential for the benefit of cybersecurity teams.
AI Continues to Advance Cybersecurity
AI offers better automation, faster, more accurate analysis and increased visibility into your network and systems, opening up exciting possibilities for security professionals.
Many SOCs already use AI and machine learning to drive risk assessments and prioritize events, incident response, and documentation. Newer technologies such as machine learning services (MLS) from Microsoft® Azure Security Center (ASC) will further enable SOCs to automate rules creation and centrally manage them within the MLS. One of many benefits is the ability to reduce false positives while simultaneously increasing detection accuracy levels overall.
Improved automation and greater risk assessment capabilities will also enable SOCs to utilize formal methods for use case content development. Automated penetration testing and breach attack simulation will become a standard requirement after each content change.
GPT-4 Will Spark a Surge in Innovation
Chatbots are becoming increasingly vital cybersecurity tools. One of the most innovative is ChatGPT, the large language model developed by OpenAI.
ChatGPT is now in its fourth version, which the company promises to be its “most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses.” GPT-4 can provide enhanced cybersecurity protection by utilizing AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning algorithms to respond to complex cybersecurity threats.
With its gift for contextual understanding, GPT-4 can reduce or even replace many cybersecurity roles that are labor-intensive, iterative, and expensive. In addition to providing automated cybersecurity solutions at a fraction of the cost, GPT-4 can also quickly adapt to new cybersecurity threats as they arise.
Organizations that deploy ChatGPT technology for cybersecurity will progressively see their operations become more efficient, cost-effective, and secure.
Get Ready for ChatGPT Versus ChatGPT
Generative AI tools are transforming the matrix between how cyberattacks are coordinated and unleashed, and how successful organizations fight back.
Bad actors are exploiting the endless possibilities of ChatGPT to quickly deploy and operationalize more sophisticated attacks. ChatGPT can mimic the input it is given and generate human-like responses that can be used to access personal data. This makes it a dangerous threat to cybersecurity teams.
ChatGPT’s ability to automatically mass produce business email compromise (BEC) communications should not be underestimated. Cleverly crafted messages can easily evade standard cybersecurity protection. It is up to us as cybersecurity practitioners to anticipate these kinds of threats and take proactive steps to tackle them before they become a real danger. Today’s cybersecurity environment has been described as an arms race between attackers and defenders, and ChatGPT is the weapon of choice.
Organizations that should be vigilant are struggling to keep pace, which makes it inevitable that this cybersecurity challenge will be a key focus in 2024 and beyond. As cyberattacks become increasingly complex and targeted, those organizations will need to fill more cybersecurity jobs while also looking for the latest cybersecurity tools to help protect their networks. ChatGPT fits the bill. It is advanced enough to automatically assess potential security threats and mitigate them with little to no human involvement, which makes it the perfect match for taking on a proliferation of ChatGPT-driven attacks.
ChatGPT Will Not Be Coming for Our Jobs
As revolutionary as ChatGPT is, it still has limitations and will never fully replace cybersecurity professionals — especially when it comes to being proactive and anticipating potential issues before they arise.
At best, ChatGPT will assist with cybersecurity tasks that help make cybersecurity professionals more effective. It can also simplify tasks that once required expert-level skills, such as knowing how to update a firewall or a router to block an IP address. For example, ChatGPT might provide step-by-step instructions to walk less skilled team members through the changes.
ChatGPT can be useful for cybersecurity analytics, event log management, and audit compliance, and it can enable more efficient processes, including:
- monitoring incoming traffic for malicious intent
- identifying malicious actors
- automating incident response
- performing an attack analysis
- detecting anomalies in security logs from different sources
- and more
ChatGPT enables SOCs to automate security-related tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming or require iterative manual effort. Implementing it can quickly free up cybersecurity personnel so they can focus on larger, more strategic tasks that require specialized knowledge.
Cybersecurity experts will always be needed: ChatGPT will simply make them more efficient and effective, resulting in improved and evolving protection from emerging threats.
Conclusion
In the coming years, advanced AI will be an essential tool for updating security protocols and launching robust cyber defense initiatives. The newest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4, stands out for its advanced features that allow for greater security, faster deployment speeds, and improved performance. The platform is quickly becoming essential for preventing potential attacks or intrusions by bad actors who are already leveraging its AI-driven learning algorithms. Plus, it offers valuable guidance and role replacement capabilities. In our increasingly connected world, it is more important than ever to take advantage of this expansive technology to protect data and networks from malicious threats. Are you ready?
About the Author
Ricky Allen is the Field CISO for CyberOne Security, an ISSA Fellow and Past-President of the South Texas ISSA chapter. He holds certifications such as SABSA Security Architecture, CISSP, CISA, and Six Sigma. At CyberOne, Ricky provides security architecture design and leadership management for customers across the country. Ricky previously held roles at Accenture as an executive in their strategic information security consulting practice and at HP Enterprise Security Products as the practice lead for developing Security Operations programs for ArcSight SIEM products. Ricky was focused on retail and manufacturing industries while at PwC where he managed penetration testing and risk assessments for companies across the US. Ricky has presented at conferences such as BSides, Black Hat, API Cybersecurity, HOU.SEC.CON, SANS, SecureWorld, and Data Connectors. Ricky is based in Houston, TX and has a degree in Management Information Systems from Texas A&M University.
