This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The cyber resilience playbook: Navigating the new era of threats.” Read more from this special issue here.
Enterprises run the very real risk of losing the AI arms race to adversaries who weaponize large language models (LLMs) and create fraudulent bots to automate attacks.
Trading on the trust of legitimate tools, adversaries are using generative AI to create malware that doesn’t create a unique signature but instead relies on fileless execution, making the attacks often undetectable. Gen AI is extensively being used to create large-scale automated phishing campaigns and automate social engineering, with attackers looking to exploit human vulnerabilities at scale.
Gartner points out in its latest Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms that “leaders in the endpoint protection market are prioritizing integrated security solutions that unify endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR) and identity protection into a single platform. This shift enables security teams to reduce complexity while improving threat visibility.”
The result? A more complex threat landscape moving at machine speed while enterprise defenders rely on outdated tools and technologies designed for a different era.
The scale of these attacks is staggering. Zscaler’s ThreatLabz indicated a nearly 60% year-over-year increase in global phishing attacks, and attributes this rise in part to the proliferation of gen AI-driven schemes. Likewise, Ivanti’s 2024 State of Cybersecurity Report found that 74% of businesses are already seeing the impact of AI-powered threats. And, nine in 10 executives said they believe that AI-powered threats are just getting started.
“If you’ve got adversaries breaking out in two minutes, and it takes you a day to ingest data and another day to run a search, how can you possibly hope to keep up?” Elia Zaitsev, CTO of CrowdStrike noted in a recent interview with VentureBeat.
The new cyber arms race: Adversarial AI vs. defensive AI on the endpoint
Adversaries, especially cybercrime syndicates and nation-state actors, are refining their tradecraft with AI, adding to their arsenals faster than any enterprise can keep up. Gen AI has democratized how adversaries, from rogue attacker …