AI Names 2024’s Biggest Cybersecurity Threats – and AI is One of Them

In 2024, cybercrime is expected to cost the world’s internet users a total of $9.22 trillion dollars. By 2028, that figure will be almost $14 trillion.

Armed with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled arsenals of cyber weapons, bad actors – fraudsters, hackers, state-sponsored cyberterrorists – are carrying out attacks with greater venom and verve; at ever-growing rates of speed and success. Meaning that, seemingly every day, cybersecurity becomes that bit more important – but it too needs AI to keep up.

We wanted to learn more about AI, cybersecurity, and how the two intersect. To settle some big questions – is AI a positive societal force, or a harmful one? – and learn more about how AI both hinders and helps the world’s ongoing tussle with cybercriminals. But we also wanted to pinpoint the biggest cybersecurity threats to internet users, and what part AI has to play.

So we thought: who better to ask than AI itself?

Emboldened, we asked five leading AI language models (ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google Bard, Claude, and Llama) what they thought about the cybersecurity landscape – and AI’s role in facilitating cybercrime. Their responses will shock, surprise, and even entertain you; but they contain plenty of good advice for staying safe on the internet, too.

First, though, let’s summarize the state of play with our top 10 AI and cybersecurity statistics.

AI in Cybersecurity: Top 10 Statistics

  • By 2030, the global AI in cybersecurity market is expected to be worth $133.8 billion.
  • Breaches that affected organizations with fully deployed security AI solutions cost them, on average, $1.8 million less than businesses without them.
  • Organizations with AI cybersecurity took 100 days less to identify and contain these data breaches when they occurred, compared to those lacking them (IBM, 2023).
  • 75% of security professionals have seen an increase in cyberattacks in the past year, and 85% blame AI.
  • Almost half (46%) of those same respondents believe generative AI (AI with the ability to create content) will leave organizations more vulnerable to cyber attacks than they were before AI (Deep Instinct, 2023).
  • Businesses are adopting an increasingly proactive, rather than reactive, approach to cybersecurity, with 2023 seeing a 95% increase toward this mentality vis a vis 2022 (Deep Instinct, 2023).
    Among cybersecurity experts’ top concerns around AI implementation were increases in privacy concerns (39%), undetectable phishing attacks (37%), and both the volume and velocity of attacks (33%) (Deep Instinct, 2023).
  • 34% of organizations are already using or implementing AI cybersecurity tools.
  • 69% of enterprises believe AI in cybersecurity is necessary due to the burgeoning number of threats that human analysts are unable to get to.
  • With AI, there will be a 150% increase in predictive analysis for cyber threats by 2025 (Zipdo, 2023).

Want more of this kind of data? Head to Techopedia’s roundup of the latest cybersecurity statistics.

This post was originally published on Techopedia