AI is certainly making a dent on the world, whether it’s impacting jobs, opinions on experts, or affecting the environment by consuming electricity and water like there’s no tomorrow, even to the tune of over 100 million litres. Yikes.
There are also good things that AI can do, but the potentially bad things appear to be stacking up, and there’s one more this week, though it appears to at least have been prevented in the short term: using AI to break things in software and the internet.
In news you can file under “it was only a matter of time”, AI has now been used to make an exploit that could have had disastrous implications.
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group has picked up on an exploit made with AI designed to bypass a multi-factor authentication system commonly used, with the group alerting the software maker ahead of time and preventing the exploit from doing its thing.
While Google hasn’t said precisely which piece of software or its developer is, the development is one of the first times in AI has been used to create the exploit, one which likely used AI to find the problem in a piece of software able to be taken advantage of.
In short, AI has helped a hacker find a way to exploit a piece of software. It surely won’t be the last time.
Google did note that while it doesn’t believe its own AI system Gemini was used to create the exploit, it found elements that suggested it was an AI model that allowed the hack to exist in the first place. It still would have needed some credentials to work, but it would definitely have given someone with more than a passing interest in cybercrime the ability to break into accounts.
AI tools have been previously used to test the waters, with Claude used to gain access into Mexican government data and infrastructure mere months ago, with a water utility a key target.
It’s just another place AI is clearly going, with coding an activity AI can clearly do alongside finding problems in other pieces of code. Regular web users probably don’t have to worry about it right now, but it’s yet another sign of what AI can do, even if the result may not be amazing.
