Reasons Why the Popularity of ChatGPT Raises Cyber Security Concerns

Did you know?

The AI market is expected to hit $1,597.1^[i] billion by 2030.

Considering the role AI is playing in making revolutionary developments, OpenAI’s ChatGPT deserves special mention here.

ChatGPT is taking the internet by storm because of its advanced AI model and impressive conversational skills.

This language processing model can generate human-like text and is suitable for applications like language transition, question answering, and text summarization.

However, while the human-like text generation feature is impressive, it also has the potential to generate deep fake text. This text can be used to impersonate individuals online and spread misinformation.

In this blog post, let’s dive deep and understand the key cyber security risks associated with ChatGPT and how you can stay wary of them.

Let’s get started!

How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT, as a large language model AI bot, is trained to respond to queries as a human would do. It does not generate these answers by taking information from the internet rather it generates responses by analyzing and interpreting human language.

It uses a neural network to create knowledgeable answers. These neural networks are algorithms that are trained to replicate the way neurons in the human brain communicate.

ChatGPT represents the next generation in OpenAI’s line of Large Language Models.

Although it uses a combination of Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune ChatGPT, it is largely the Reinforcement Learning component that makes ChatGPT unique.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) uses human feedback in the training process to reduce untruthful, biased outputs.

Real-World Uses of ChatGPT

1. SQL is an important tool for a data scientist. ChatGPT can generate SQL queries from text prompts and help you understand SQL.

2. Unstructured data is difficult to manage and organize. ChatGPT can convert this unorganized data into structured, organized data.

3. ChatGPT can be trained on a dataset of user data, which can help it to create personalized content such as emails, social media posts, and product recommendations.

4. Businesses can train the ChatGPT model on a large dataset of text and analyze the sentiment of a piece of text.

Even though ChatGPT is the hot artificial intelligence app of the moment, there’s a great deal of speculation about how it will raise cyber security concerns.

So let’s take a look at the top cyber risks associated with ChatGPT.

Top Four Cyber Risks Associated With ChatGPT

1. Phishing Emails: Phishing and scam emails are usually identifiable with typos and poor grammar. But hackers can send prompts in their native language and ChatGPT can write well-crafted response emails that can be used for phishing scams. Thus, identifying phishing from these well-written emails can be difficult, which might result in more phishing attacks.

2. Malware: ChatGPT has the ability to create code in Python, JavaScript, and C. This makes the AI chatbot pretty good at creating sophisticated ‘polymorphic’ malware. Though ChatGPT is supposed to filter malware, experts say that the platform merely complies with the demands of the prompter and makes it easy for cybercriminals to generate malicious programming.

3. Privacy Issues: ChatGPT is an AI-generative tool that collects and processes a huge amount of personal data questioning the security of user data. ChatGPT’s privacy policy allows the tool to use any information entered into it. This can be a cause of concern since the data entered might be used for malicious purposes and can be compromised.

4. Biased Content: All machine learning models are trained on a dataset and have the ability to learn and act like humans. ChatGPT is trained on 570 GB^[ii] of data and there have been instances where it has provided racist and sexist responses. Such responses can hamper the quality and diversity of the demographic data, and create gender bias, and cultural differences.

How to Mitigate Cybersecurity Threats From AI-Powered Tools?

1. Define Your Security Policies: Your security policies should include detailed procedures on how to detect and prevent misuse.

Ensure that they entail the potential consequences of misuse of company resources and guidelines for conducting insider investigations.

Study the incident handling process mentioned in your policy manual and amend the sections on trusting insiders.

2. Encourage Responsible AI Designs: With AI gaining the top spot, it is more critical than ever to implement responsible AI practices. Therefore, organizations must set ground rules while creating AI-powered systems.

For instance, establish a review board representing cross-functional disciplines followed in your organization, create a secure and reliable governance structure, and cultivate a culture of trust.

3. Leverage a Trusted Approach: To secure a compromised AI system, a ‘trusted computing’ model should be implemented that ‘protects’, ‘detects’, ‘attests’, and ‘recovers’ from any malicious coding.

Considering the data set aspect of a system, a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) can verify that the data provided to the machine comes from a reliable source. TPM also ensures that the AI algorithm is safe and provides software keys to protect and attest the algorithms.

Furthermore, the Root of Trust hardware such as the Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE) can help you ensure that connected devices maintain data integrity.

Key Takeaway

ChatGPT is a powerful tool for initiating human-like interactions. However, it is important to be aware of the cybersecurity threats it can pose. Given its growing popularity, businesses should play it safe and verify that their cybersecurity mechanisms are adept at handling the potential misuse of this technology.

Learn More About How ChatGPT Can Pose a Security Risk. Get in Touch!

References

^[i] AI Statistics
^[ii] ChatGPT Statistics