By Ripu Bajwa, Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies India
Generative AI (GenAI) represents a significant turning point for cybersecurity both as a challenge and a solution. GenAI encompasses systems that can understand, learn, adapt to and implement knowledge across a broad array of tasks, much like a human would. The intersection of GenAI and cybersecurity is viewed through these two lenses:
1. GenAI represents an application workload that needs to be afforded all the security necessary to keep the data and applications safe.
2. GenAI is also a partner technology helping to protect IT environments with greater sophistication and scale.
As the capabilities of GenAI expand, so do the associated security concerns. For example, there are more convincing digital spoofing, phishing attacks and activities posing an immediate risk to digital users. In addition, there are cases in which GenAI has been trained and can solve CAPTCHA, creating more opportunities for bad actors to perform malicious activities. According to the Dell Technologies 2024 Innovation Catalyst report, 45% of Indian businesses felt a lack of security and data protection solutions for GenAI. GenAI’s rapid automation capabilities can swiftly incorporate new and potent tools, such as ransomware-as-a-service and advanced hacking techniques.
GenAI’s capability extends to creating convincing deepfakes, producing eerily realistic videos, audio or images. As the lines blur between what’s real and what’s AI-generated, trust in digital content, communications and systems may erode.
GenAI systems can also be targets for adversarial attacks, and their functionality can be used maliciously if not properly secured. Securing these environments begins by implementing trusted devices and trusted infrastructure that have strong access control measures to prevent unauthorised access and the potential misuse of the system. Additionally, because GenAI systems rely on vast amounts of data for learning and decision making, ensuring the privacy and integrity of this data is crucial. Moreover, as per the latest Dell Technologies Innovation Catalyst report, 52% of the organisations in India believe that protecting sensitive data is the biggest challenge in their data management processes. To ensure the security of the data, capabilities like data classification, encryption, secure data storage, data protection and transmission techniques must be in place. Putting in place regular audits, bias mitigation techniques and ethical guidelines are also necessary to alleviate these biases. GenAI can also be a key ally in our fight against cyber threats, opening novel avenues to protect businesses in an ever-evolving threat landscape. If we look at the findings of the Dell Technologies 2024 Innovation Catalyst report, 94% of organisations said AI and GenAI could help them prevent, detect, and respond to out-of-policy threats and behaviour. Strengthening of the cyber resilience architecture can be achieved through –
1. Predictive Tools and Personalised Training: GenAI will help organisations reduce their threat landscape by providing better predictive tools to recognise potential attacks and offering personalised training to correct unintended behaviors.
2. Improved Threat Detection and Response: GenAI can enhance the efficacy of threat detection and response by analysing vast amounts of data quickly, mitigating potential damage, and aiding in recovery from cyberattacks through automation.
3. Efficiency and Security Skills Gap: GenAI will increase efficiency and address the security skills gap by freeing up human security personnel to focus on more strategic and complex tasks.
GenAI represents a dual-edged sword for cybersecurity. It brings new challenges that require us to rethink and evolve our cybersecurity strategies and protect our large language models (LLM). However, there is no question that GenAI can help companies drive their innovation objectives. It promises improved threat detection and response, predictive capabilities, and operational efficiency. The key lies in utilising GenAI’s benefits while proactively addressing the risks through robust security measures, continuous monitoring, regular updates and patching and an ever-evolving approach to data privacy and ethics. As we step into the GenAI era, the relationship between AI and cybersecurity will continue to be one of symbiotic evolution.
