Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) prone to threats by which it can be hacked?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing how businesses used to work which is due to the high adoption of the technology in retail, financial, and technology industries. Business is advocating their efficiency and production rate increasing with artificial intelligence. Executives of organizations see artificial intelligence investment as a product with a high return on investment to the organization. AIis proving itself to be the backbone supporting the economic investments of the country.

In cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence is the forefront fighter in the battle of saving organizations against hackers. According to MarketsAndMarkets report, artificial intelligence is projected to be a 38.2 billion USD industry by 2026. The prominent market value projection of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity paints a great picture. Yet artificial intelligence is like a double edge sword where hackers trying to gain access to your intelligent AI devices could cause more damage to your organization than the benefits you would have thought of getting from AI. Let us find out in this blog whether Artificial intelligence is threat proof from hackers or not.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is the branch of study which focuses on the question “if a machine can think?” Artificial intelligence tries to develop the capability of a machine to perform and think like a human. Machine are trained to make decisions like a human. This is done to shift the workload from human to machine, thus making people’s lives easier. The low prices of chipset and increase in computing speed of computer have made it possible for a man to have to talk back machine chatbox to self-driving car etc. in the world for an affordable price of the general public. According to finacesonline.com report, around 54% of organizations and leaders think AI tools play a significant role in boosting productivity in the organization. Artificial intelligence is changing industries into the “smart industry.”

Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Today every industry is adopting artificial intelligence at a very high rate. AI is bringing the workload of workers and helping organizations increase productivity with the machine. Some of the applications of AI in the market are:

1. AI is being used to develop a fully automated self-driving car. These cars will navigate their way from one place to another without much intervention from the car owner. Tesla Inc. is one such company bringing out cars with self-driving functionality.
2. AI in sales: AI usage in sales is rapidly increasing for forecasting and mail marketing, increasing profits.
3. Healthcare is a place where AI has been adopted with warm hearts. Chatbox is listening to patients, to the promising development in helping doctors predicting the ailments with the help of patients reports AI is slowly taking everything over.
4. AI in cybersecurity is very drastically helping organizations fend against foreign attacks with quick and effective responses. AI is helping cybersecurity professionals identify the pattern of attack in time to mitigate the risk.

Can We Hack Artificial Intelligence?

The sophistication of AI makes it the best technology helping organizations further their goals and ambitions. Yet, suppose the Artificial Intelligence technology installed in an organization is hacked. In that case, this could be hazardous and detrimental to the company and incur loss rather than profit. It is effortless to hack an AI machine by altering the dataset and confusing the machine to predict the wrong object instead of the real object. This might not sound so dangerous, but it is enough to cause disruptive incidents and cause loss of property and lives.

A self-autonomous car dataset being hacked could result in the car unable to identify the green signal from red; it could cause the vehicle to move into the oncoming traffic and cause accidents. The autonomous missiles misidentifying the friendly target for the real target could be disastrous. The security camera fed with the wrong database could mislead face detection to allow access to unauthorized persons in critical places like airports, border checks, etc. The severity of AI being hacked create a dilemma in the use of the system. Companies need to invest in robust AI security at a similar pace as the speed of adoption of AI technology. A safe and secure environment for AI is actively looked into by governments and organizations.

Cyberattacks against AI:

1. Input attacks: In this attack, attackers alter the input entered in the algorithm with an attack pattern that may go unnoticed or undetected. This causes the AI system to return false or irrelevant output.
2. Poisoning attacks: Hackers feed false data set information to disrupt the machine learning algorithm, which affects the data mining processes.
3. Evasion attacks: In these attacks, attackers flood the algorithm with faulty inputs, leading to incorrect decisions.
4. Privacy attacks: The training phase is exploited to gather information from the algorithm.

How to Protect AI Technology?

• There should be good data hygiene at all the time. The collected dataset should only be of the data required to train the artificial model.
• The dataset access should only be with the user of the data, and it should not fall into an unauthorized individual.
• The dataset used should be accurate, and there should be a good representation of the data object that it is to be trained on and developed.
• The dataset should have less algorithmic bias, and the model should be trained on a variety of data in the databases.

Conclusion

It’s not only cybersecurity specialists using Artificial Intelligence to defend against ethical hacking, but hackers are also using artificial intelligence to conduct dangerous attacks. The robustness in artificial intelligence security is not of primary focus for organizations, as is the adoption of AI. This is a mistake, and there needs to be more focus on the secure and safe adoption of Artificial Intelligence to safeguard ourselves against hackers. Organizations and governments need to focus more on the security aspect of artificial intelligence technology and have a dedicated team of ethical hackers to strengthen their autonomous system and protect it from hackers’ malicious intent. Ethical hackers are trained cybersecurity experts well-versed in protecting AI technology, computer system, and networks against hackers.

For security enthusiasts reading the blog, to become an Ethical Hacker, EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification is one the best certificates identified by industry leaders and governments worldwide. It is developed by security experts and designed to impart knowledge of becoming an Ethical hacker.

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