Arrival of AI like throwing ‘petrol’ on cybercrime
The malicious use of AI (artificial intelligence) is helping cyber criminals to massively upscale their operations, a Cork cybersecurity expert has warned.
According to Robert McArdle, Director of Cybercrime Research at TrendAI’s Cork HQ, a business unit of Trend Micro, the effect of AI on cybercrime is like throwing petrol on a fire.
With organisations across Cork on high alert following a number of recent high profile alleged cyberattacks, Mr McArdle said AI is being used more and more by cyber criminals to increase the efficiency of existing criminal enterprises.
“It's an accelerant. You pour it on top of everything that was previously working, and then it all runs faster, more efficient, higher volume, higher scale,” he said.
“Instead of getting thousands of phishing attacks, you now have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. That scales their business massively,” added Mr McArdle.
In tackling the new and ever-growing threat of AI in cybercrime, Mr McArdle and his team divide attackers into AI-enhanced threats, and AI-dependent threats.
A strong example of the latter, he explained, is the recent phenomenon of deepfakes.
Mr McArdle said: “With something like deepfakes, it's started to split down into niche sub-industries. They have some volume-based deepfakes, like a celebrity impersonation that tries to get you to invest in cryptocurrency, down to individually targeted things, maybe against a specific executive.”
Cybersecurity firms also see deepfakes used for things like non-consensual pornography, said Mr McArdle.
He continued: “It's used for both sextortion, which is effectively, ‘I'll release the pictures if you don't give me money’, and of course, for things like child sexual abuse material as well. It's used heavily for that.”
Speculation and incident management
There has been massive disruption in the UK over the past 48 hours with over 1,500 flights to and from UK airports cancelled due to what was initially speculated to be a cyberattack. However, the UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) has since confirmed the issue was the result of a major technical breakdown.
As a result of the incident, nine flights in and out of Cork Airport have been cancelled by the time of writing this article.
“If something goes down like an airport, people immediately say, ‘Cyberattack – must be!’,” said Mr McArdle.
He continued: “It could also be that a machine somewhere died, or somebody poured water over it. But people jump to those assumptions.
“Part of it is shutting down those assumptions if we can, and not jumping on the kind of ambulance chasing that some elements of the media will do, because that's not helpful.”
On 25 August, a confirmed cyberattack on healthcare multinational Boston Scientific’s plant in Cork city caused shares in the company to fall by 3.5%. The incident came just five months after a cyberattack severely disrupted operations at medical technology company Stryker who also have headquarters in Cork.
“When the Boston Scientific stuff was happening, of course, people were running around jumping to conclusions,” said Mr McArdle.
“They (Boston Scientific) haven't put out that many facts so far because they're probably still figuring it out. So, when people were jumping around saying, ‘Well, it's clearly ransomware’, that was actually based on one tweet by somebody somewhere who just guessed it. There was no evidence of that,” he added.
At the end of the day, Mr McArdle said the only people who really understand what's going on are the people working on the issue in Boston Scientific.
“They'll come out with the information when it's appropriate to do so.
Global hacking contest returns to Cork
For the third year in a row, the prestigious Pwn2Own computer hacking contest will return to Cork as part of Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative.
Some of the best computer hackers on the planet will travel to Cork for the event at which hundreds of thousands of euros worth of prizes are up for grabs.
Taking place on 6 October at Trend Micro’s Cork site on Model Farm Road, the contest will see some of the best-known names in the global hacking community go head-to-head to try to find previously unknown vulnerabilities in modern software, with a strong focus on AI platforms like Claude Code and OpenAI.