A new report from Techopedia highlights the staggering impact of artificial intelligence on the cybersecurity industry, predicting that the AI cybersecurity market will be worth $133 billion by 2030. It details how businesses and professionals view the use of AI as both positive and negative, giving us a glimpse into the future of cybersecurity.
On the positive side, AI-enhanced security systems can quickly analyze large amounts of data to detect threats at a speed that human analysts simply cannot manage. Last year, more than 530 signals of potential cyberattacks were recorded every second.
This scale – now achievable through the use of artificial intelligence – can only be handled by professionals using AI systems and processes that can keep up. 69% of the companies surveyed agreed with this view, stating that artificial intelligence will become a cybersecurity requirement in 2024 and beyond.
This is evident when looking at data from businesses that have AI security systems versus those that don’t use them. Companies that use AI in cybersecurity detect fewer data breaches within 100 days than those that don’t, and cost $1.8 million less on average.
A huge difference! AI systems are also ideal for future-proof organizations. By leveraging available data to create threat simulations, they can assess vulnerabilities and predict the types of attacks that may occur.
However, hackers are also using artificial intelligence to find more innovative ways to solve this problem, mainly through more advanced phishing to trick people. AI-generated deepfake phishing – growing 3,000% in 2023 – are more personalized to their targets, making them harder to detect. More than a third of cybersecurity professionals (37%) say these attacks are a major problem.
This has become a reality. A recent notable case involved a financial professional handing over $25 million to a scammer who generated and impersonated the company’s CFO and team during a video call.
Cybersecurity professionals clearly point to AI as the problem – 75% blame the technology for a huge increase in cybercrime, which is expected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. They’re not the only ones who think this way.In the Techopedia report, four out of five AI language model systems identified AI-driven attacks as the main cybersecurity threat to Internet users in 2024.Is this a creepy moment of self-reflection?
In an ongoing race to innovate at a rapid pace, it’s clear that artificial intelligence has and will continue to change cybersecurity as we know it—for better and for worse.
