George Thanks to the simplycyber community along with Gerald Auger, Jax Scott, Eric Taylor, and BHIS who opened my eyes to this new threat.
12/12/22
For many in IT, I always try to innovate and stay on top of the latest trends. My current and future roles I hope will provide me with the continuation of learning. I can’t remember who said that “In CyberSecurity, you will have to be a lifetime learner”. Besides my love of Tech Toys, I love to learn, innovate and continue to grow.
Thus today I want to present a new threat to everyone’s eyes, if it wasn’t for the Cyber podcasts of SymplyCyber, Black Hils Info Security, and many others, I too would have missed this new and emerging threat.
“In general, cybersecurity incidents can take many forms, such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, and phishing scams. These incidents can have various impacts, including the theft or loss of sensitive data, disruption of services, and financial losses. The perpetrators of such incidents can be individuals, organized groups, or even nation-states.
To protect against cybersecurity incidents, individuals and organizations can take a number of steps, such as regularly updating their software and using strong passwords. They can also use security tools such as antivirus software and firewalls to detect and prevent attacks. In addition, it is important to be aware of potential threats and to be cautious when sharing sensitive information online.
Overall, cybersecurity is a growing concern in today’s digital age, and it is important for individuals and organizations to take steps to protect themselves against potential incidents. While there is no foolproof way to prevent such incidents, being proactive and using best practices can help to minimize the risks.”
Why is the above paragraph In quotes you ask, well these statements were not written by me, nor were they written by a human being? Let me introduce you to OpenAI ChatGPT. (ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue (openai.com) (Links to an external site.))
The opening paragraph reads “Recently, there have been many cybersecurity incidents that have made headlines, but I am unable to provide specific details because I am a large language model trained by OpenAI and I do not have access to the internet or current news. As a language model, my knowledge is limited to the text that I have been trained on, which has a fixed cutoff point in 2021. ”
When I first started hearing about OpenAI Chat GPT, I was a bit excited about and new software to help me in my daily life. I, who struggles with term papers, and written text, could see the advantages of AI. I rely heavily on tools like Grammarly, to proofread my work. My brain will read what it wanted to write, and not what is actually written. During active incidents, I have sent out emails that no one could understand, I have actually taken the approach of verbally asking someone to send out the alert and allow me to fix this issue and then write the follow-up. Having access to ChatGPT would allow me to send out an email in a few seconds that anyone could understand.
Myself, I followed the stories and started hearing people using ChatGPT to write their term papers, then the researchers (and threat actors) started asking Open Ai to write convincing phishing emails and text. Then just the other started asking for it to write code, ransomware code. SC Media ” How ChatGPT is changing the way cybersecurity practitioners look at the potential of AI” (Links to an external site.)At least one researcher was able to get ChatGPT to write an overflow buffer exploit. This is a brand new threat to our end users, our system, and our data. The days of script kiddies are about to explode. Starting at about 2 dollars threat actors have pools of Corporate Emails access with automated systems to sell you creds on the dark web. Bleeping Computer. (Links to an external site.)Today with a few dollars, basic web skills, and some time on your hands you to, can breach the human factor of Computers. The damage I feel is yet to be seen in this new war of the White and Gray hats vs the world.
I took this assignment to heart, I might have stretched the objective a bit, however, I feel that asking someone who is actively pursuing CyberSecuity, to write about any past incident wasn’t going to be good enough for me. The past is a great learning tool, and I have done a number of postmortems in my work. However, I needed to present this new and emerging threat when I heard about ChatGPT. Again this morning on how people are using it to exploit it. This threat is new, it’s basically a little know Zero Day that is in the wild now. The damage and impact aren’t unknown or not yet happing. The full extent of the damage is yet known. This is ransomware, this is phishing, this is actual exploiting of users. Every single day CISO, NIST, and others are full of stories and impact reports of these types of threats and the damage done. Just like crypto real humans are losing money and sometimes everything they have. The damage to all is real, the threat is real, and the time to be defensive is now.
The impact is money, the impact is stolen identity, and the impact is unprecedented.
Lastly, I recently it wouldn’t be right for me to not bring this up, in a number of countries, what we consider cybercrime is just a business model, to some it’s a way to feed their families, it’s a way out of poverty. Are they threat actors playing the game or are they trying to survive, personally we need to learn more about them and their lives. Thus for us the defenders we have to get inside the minds of our counterparts. (I think this was the Art of War)
Best to all. I can’t wait to continue this topic.. I do post my thoughts at my blog @ cyberhound.tech
George S
