Michael Gips, Chief Strategy Officer, Emergence Technology Group, explores the new technologies making their mark on the security industry.

What is true? Is that person who they say they are? Who can be trusted to verify information? When is a fact a fact?

Will we even take the time to consider those questions in our fast-paced work and personal lives?

These questions are all foundational to security, involving issues such as verification, identity, trust and credibility.

They will increasingly come to the fore in 2024.

Quickly expanding artificial intelligence (AI) abilities are making the significance of the above questions much more acute.

Traditional phishing attacks are still effective, even though the methods and vectors of attack haven’t changed much in years and our companies have evolved sophisticated staff education and awareness programs about the threat.

AI-charged phishing attacks can be much more targeted, credible, professionally written and relevant to the victim, making them much harder to detect.

Consider bogus emails asking you to quickly buy $500 worth of gift cards for the boss.

Those become a lot more convincing if they drop in the names of staff at your company, use the same expressions as your boss or even take the form of deepfake voice messages.

AI also risks widening the societal rifts that divide us.

Social media platforms, internet cookies, bots and other digital denizens keep us in our echo chambers, serving us a steady stream of information that is designed to stir outrage.

The typically tranquil environment of academia has become a flashpoint of violence.

Throughout the world but particularly in the US, college campuses are riven by the situation in Israel and Palestine following the 7 October conflict.

Antisemitic acts at colleges have skyrocketed, while Islamophobia has increased as well. Even if that crisis subsides, campuses may remain at a boiling point.

In addition, nation states will continue targeted attacks in their attempt to disrupt the Americas, fostering dissension, defiance and the erosion of our basic institutions.

Countries throughout the Americas are still divided on topics such as the gravity of COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccinations, climate change and so on.

Any assertion can contain partial facts, facts wrapped in untruths or contingent facts. It becomes too hard to untangle, so we adapt the relevant facts to our beliefs.

It gets much more difficult with AI.

Democracy-advocacy group Freedom House recently released a report saying that in 2023, “AI-based tools that can generate images, text or audio were utilized in at least 16 countries to distort information on political or social issues.”

Expect those numbers to increase.

The role of AI in propagating misinformation is particularly dire in nations where mistrust of institutions such as the press, government and corporations is already high.

Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2021, for example, showed that only 36% of Argentines trust media sources.

That’s troubling in a nation perennially teetering on financial disaster.

Furthermore, AI in 2024 may well seize on any corporate imbroglio, such as the scandal involving a training course on racism given to some Coca-Cola employees in which a slide urged them to “be less white”.

The fallout could have been much worse with AI generating and propagating damaging memes.

AI has many valuable uses for security – detection of breaches, malware and phishing, to name just a few.

However, security often lags behind adversarial use of new technology so we have to be especially observant in this rapidly evolving space.

Michael Gips

Michael Gips, JD, CPP, CSyP, is Chief Strategy Officer at Emergence Technology Group, which provides life-saving technology via voiceprint biometrics.

He is also Principal of Global Insights in Professional Security (GIPS), in which he helps corporations with security strategies, researches the security industry, writes and presents on trends, advises startups and conducts training.

This article was originally published in the Special February Influencers Edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.