Did you know that there has been a 1200% surge in phishing attacks? The rise of AI has turned into a double-edged sword as it can aid businesses but it can also target them.
AI-powered cyber attacks have now evolved. There is a growth of AI-driven phishing attacks, AI-enabled credential abuse, intelligent ransomware, and more. Companies need to be proactive in securing corporate data, rely on a modern backup solution, and follow the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy.
How AI-powered cyber threats are impacting businesses today
AI-powered cyber attacks are now becoming the norm, not the exception. As AI is adaptive and self-learning, it is capable of accelerating the speed of ransomware attacks by creating phishing emails or even injecting malicious codes or prompts.
Moving from traditional phishing attacks, AI-driven phishing is much more powerful as it uses machine learning, generative AI, and automation to launch attacks. It is capable of creating personalized phishing emails (with no errors) that are convincing and targeted towards specific individuals. AI has the ability to do so as it grabs information from company websites, LinkedIn profiles, social media, and more to create personalized emails that seem genuine.
Traditional phishing emails were easy to spot as they often contained multiple spelling errors and seemed overly eager or friendly. AI now removes all that. This means that AI-driven phishing can now bypass email filters, keyword detection, and even security rules as it is capable of tweaking and evolving its attack during mid-attack. For instance, the messages will be tailored to each individual. Even the malicious link sent to each recipient will be tweaked. AI can also use a conversational tone to sound less scammy.
In the case of AI-based credential abuse, valid credentials are now automatically discovered, thanks to AI. In the past, attackers would have to guess or steal or even abuse login credentials in an attempt to try and access company systems. As AI is good at learning and predicting, it can guess passwords and patterns or even specific regional password habits. This means AI can predict password variations and even adapt in real-time even as logins fail.
It also predicts patterns of companies, based on the data fed to it by the attackers, making it able to mimic employee behavior by trying to log in at a specific time, from a particular location, by using predictable patterns, therefore bypassing the company’s anomaly-based defenses, as they wouldn’t predict anything is wrong. This could easily lead to data exfiltration or even ransomware deployment, as once the AI is inside the system, it can escalate its privileges and access systems it should never have been allowed to access.
On the other hand, intelligent ransomware is much harder to discover as it could lay dormant and observe patterns and attack only when it determines the timing is right. Instead of landing and immediately encrypting all the data and asking the company for a ransom, intelligent ransomware observes the environment they are in, identifying critical systems and slowly disabling defenses.
Some ransomware strains may even be able to disable themselves if they detect analysis tools. This means that they are able to classify stolen data, identify what could cause significant damage to a company and strike when the time is right i.e., during the holidays or any other major events.
The threat of AI-powered attacks is very real as they could increase the risk of data loss and severely impact business continuity. This is why companies need to have a robust data protection solution in place to ensure that copies of data are stored safely and can be recovered without any issues if the time comes.
Combat the threats of AI-powered attacks with Synology ActiveProtect
With the evolution of AI, it’s important to keep your defenses up, maintain multiple copies of your backups, and ensure data resiliency by using advanced security techniques to safeguard your data.
Companies need to implement a cyber-resilient data protection solution capable of isolating data and deterring threat actors. A multi-layered system is needed to follow the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy to ensure that multiple copies of your backups are stored on separate media and at a secure, isolated location, making them untouchable and enabling reliable recovery.
As an integrated backup appliance, Synology ActiveProtect comes with its own pre-configured hardware and operating system called ActiveProtect Manager so that companies can streamline their data protection, perform backups automatically, recover data fast, and secure data with advanced security features such as built-in immutability, offline backups, access controls, and more. Learn more
Role-based access controls are another critical component here. Least-privilege permissions should be granted to employees only. This means that employees should only have access to the systems they need to use at work. Limit the number of employees who have access to critical data at work and set up access controls so that only a limited number of users can perform backups or recover data.
Companies should also be regularly testing their backups and have a disaster recovery strategy in place. ActiveProtect comes with a built-in hypervisor that can be used for DR testing to ensure clean copies of your backups can be recovered in case of sudden data loss.
What corporations need is a resilient, powerful, and multi-layered data protection solution to combat the threats of AI-based cyber attacks, reduce downtime, and ensure data recovery within minutes, not hours.
Learn more about ActiveProtect today and view our Cyber Recovery Guide.