Cybersecurity expert: The ‘zero-trust’ world of AI
November 29, 2024
Good morning. Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, and are all properly fed and watered in anticipation of a hectic Black Friday.
Or maybe you, like me, do your Black Friday shopping online and will spend the day dreaming about the Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich you’re gonna make yourself at lunch.
To each his own.
But, considering that technology and digital gadgets tend to make up a good portion of Black Friday purchases, I figured today would be a good day to jump, once again, into that intersection of AI and cybersecurity.
— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View
In today’s newsletter:
👁️🗨️ Cybersecurity expert: The ‘zero-trust’ world of AI
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Cybersecurity expert on the importance of digital health
Source: Created with AI by The Deep View
In many ways, artificial intelligence, privacy and cybersecurity are all closely interrelated.
Algorithms and machine learning have been a favored tool of cybersecurity professionals for years, aiding them in their constant battle to keep networks secure. Such tech has also been a favored tool of hackers, threat actors and cybercriminals, aiding them in their regular efforts to infiltrate networks.
This has all heated up recently, with Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI enhancing everyone’s capabilities. For cybercriminals, this is coming out in a number of ways, Protexxa founder and CEO Claudette McGowan told me; beyond the mass deployment of deepfakes and misinformation, her firm is seeing instances of data poisoning and the spread of malware through generative AI models.
And average internet users, meanwhile, live in the middle of this battlefield, unwittingly producing the data that has fueled these algorithms, unknowingly giving cybercriminals the very weapons that are then deployed against them.
Your digital footprint: Your digital footprint refers to your digital profile; every action you take online — every Google search, every social media click, search, like or comment, every email you send, every email you open, every email you delete, every website you go to, every app you download, how long you spend on each website you open, etc. — gets collected, parsed, curated (and sold) by a number of organizations, from website owners to app developers, social media platforms and data brokers.
As of 2021, there were 540 officially registered data brokers in the U.S. — this doesn’t count the data that’s collected and sold by cybercriminals. These guys are legal.
And your digital profile is probably a lot bigger than you might think. See, everything I listed above refers to active data collection, which is essentially usage-related data. But many apps and services also passively collect data about you (this stuff is all in their privacy policies, but man, those are skippable. I, however, love reading them).
Here, that passive collection of data could include location information (tracking data) and device information, such as what kind of hardware you’re using, what apps you have on your device, what browsers you use, when you’re on wifi versus cellular, whether and when you plug in headphones, what websites you visit, information regarding your device’s phonebook and information regarding your device’s camera roll.
This sounds like a lot. But each of these is mentioned specifically in Snapchat’s privacy policy.
But, okay, even that one’s not surprising — Snapchat is a photo and communication social media app, at the end of the day. Here’s one that may surprise you, though: your car collects and sells information about you. And the type of that information, according to a report last year, is largely unnecessary.
For instance, Nissan collects video and audio recordings of their drivers, internet search history (you plug your phone into your car, after all), records of personal property, your age, race, name, ethnicity and sex, your credit card number, your education and employment history and address, among other things.
Why should you care: Even if that data is just collected, rather than being sold, it is still vulnerable to hackers. And data leaks have become somewhat common.
That data, once acquired, according to one cybersecurity professor, can be used “to suss out answers to security challenge questions like ‘in what city did you meet your spouse?’ or to hone phishing attacks by posing as a colleague or work associate. When phishing attacks are successful, they give the attackers access to networks and systems the victims are authorized to use.”
And generative AI has become a powerful tool in the realm of parsing and processing all that data to quickly find needles in haystacks, to develop hyperpersonalized phishing attacks or break into secure networks.
This is all in addition to the most prominent way your data is legally used, which involves hyper-personalized advertising and marketing campaigns.
The reality here, according to McGowan, is that the risk at hand is not just personal. The line between work and personal footprints has become completely blurred to the point of nonexistence, something spurred on in part by the pandemic.
“If I happen to get so lucky as to infiltrate someone's device, do I think I'm only going to find personal things there? Or are there snapshots of the (work) screen that you took because it was easier than sending it through … there's all these ways that we bypass process,” she said.
Websites you access and log into on a corporate device, corporate portals you access on a personal device, or, for instance, using ChatGPT or a similar chatbot to summarize work-related information … these all represent added vulnerabilities in a long, vulnerable chain that can be tugged on by cyber criminals.
“So the line is blurred. How do we fix this? I think obviously number one is education,” McGowan said, saying that as much as it is important for people to become AI literate, people have to “get cyber literate. You can’t be connected and not protected. So this education piece is very big.”
Adding that having a visual way to access and assess your digital health is vital, right now, she added that technical solutions aren’t always the answer. It all starts with smart processes and shifts in mindset, such as code words between family and friends.
“To me, it's zero trust. It's that innocence that we have as a species that we have to now say, ‘I'm gonna fight against that, and I'm gonna just validate everything, and I'm gonna have multiple layers of validation,’” McGowan said.
“I don't believe we're in a world today where we can just take everything at face value … we have to check and challenge everything.”
Protexxa, which offers an AI-powered cybersecurity solution to connect the dots between personal and corporate cyber hygiene, recently closed a $10 million Series A funding round.
McGowan told me that her clients were “not ready” for the threat of the AI boom. Many didn’t have strategies or policies in place in advance, which means those strategies are being written on the go. And in that, the key thing that’s been missing revolves around standards and education — “we're seeing this kind of rush to governance and frameworks and looking at privacy and the education and bringing people up that data literacy curve.”
This is all very much in line with impressions shared by other cybersecurity experts, who have told me that we need a massive shift in culture around digital trust, mainly, that we can no longer trust, by default, anything we encounter in a digital environment.
Which image is real? |
🤔 Your thought process:
Selected Image 1 (Left):
“I first zoomed in on both and couldn't really figure out any obvious tells. so I zoomed back out and flipped between them. The perspective of Image 2 felt ‘off’ like the uncanny valley.”
Selected Image 2 (Right):
“Fingers on (the) right hand of 1 looked strange.”
💭 A poll before you go
Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!
We’ll see you in the next one.
Here’s your view on digital clones:
32% of you are not interested; 25% might be, but only with proper guardrails and regulations.
13% said it’ll never happen; 13% think it would be cool.
No, thank you:
“We need to protect real art. It’s what makes us truly human.”
Favorite Thanksgiving dessert? |