Looking at the role GenAI plays in cyber security, according to the authors of a paper published by the Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technologies, the technology poses new cyber risks and opportunities. Principal research engineer Sarah Mercer, and Tim Watson who is the Institute’s director for science and innovation, defence and national security, said there are various ways GenAI could disrupt the cyber security landscape.
“While GenAI can exacerbate existing risks with respect to the speed and scale of reconnaissance, social engineering, and spearphishing, the current impact of its code-generation abilities demonstrates a lesser effect on the attack landscape,” they said.
However, Mercer and Watson believe that current GenAI systems offer unique strengths, particularly in pattern recognition and natural language processing, where they are able to draw on extensive training data and offer multimodal capabilities. “Targeted application of these abilities to enhance state-of-the-art systems could significantly elevate existing technologies, for both cyber threat and cyber defence,” they added.
- Cliff Saran
