AI Could Give a Significant Boost to Cybercrime

­According to a recent survey, the public is overwhelmingly pessimistic on AI, and if it follows the trajectory of spam, they’re right to be concerned.

The Pew Research Center survey is revealing – while 56% of experts believe AI will have a “very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years”, only 17% of the public feels the same.

A full 76% of experts think AI will benefit them personally (vs 24% of the public), while the public has little faith in AI’s (potential) positive impact on specific industries and sectors like “how people do their jobs” (23%), the economy (21%), and even the criminal justice system (19%).

Experts and the public both have a gloomy outlook on AI benefiting personal relationships, the environment, “the news people get,” and perhaps worst of all, elections. If people have troubling sussing out fake news today, imagine what happens when political shenanigans may or may not be entirely fictitious.

Course, the survey leaves out one very important area – other than a vague reference to “the criminal justice system,” it doesn’t touch on AI’s potential as a catalyst for cyber crime.

Back in the day, we learned that automating spam e-mails to millions of unwitting recipients was good business – all it took was a few suckers, a microscopic percentage of the whole, to justify the minimal costs.

What happens when malicious actors utilize AI agents for more than just tech support or shopping assistance?

As pointed out by MIT Technology Review, “AI agents represent an attractive prospect to cybercriminals. They’re much cheaper than hiring the services of professional hackers and could orchestrate attacks more quickly and at a far larger scale than humans could.”  

AI agents could think far quicker and more creatively than relatively dumb bots and at much greater scale.

They could probe for vulnerabilities, gather intel, and even launch complex cyber and ransomware attacks. At some point, the scale is just a matter of money and one’s moral compass.

Our AI overloads could look far more benign than Sci-Fi would have us believe – less Cyberdyne and more surreptitious cyberattacks that destroy us from within.