Both individuals and enterprises are experiencing a rapidly evolving era where AI operates at a personal level for individuals and a deeper professional level for enterprises. From edge computing units to healthcare, from finance to cybersecurity through automation – everyone is using AI. However, the ever-increasing development of AI also invites new cyber threats and attack vectors, surfacing new forms of trouble for individuals and professionals.
That is why enterprises and professionals should follow different cyber-hygiene and best practices to protect themselves from unpredictable threats and attack techniques. Cyber hygiene can help enterprises protect networks, systems, and sensitive data or credentials from cyber threats. This article is a 360-degree go-through, highlighting cyber hygiene, its significance, and actionable strategies to maintain cybersecurity in a world driven by artificial intelligence systems.
The Era of AI & Its Complications
AI has already taken the market with its revolutionary automation and intelligence. Every sector is using AI in some form. However, this complicated engineering marvel needs to follow regulations and best practices. Biased datasets in AI can generate an unsolicited or abrupt outcome. Model evasion can also lead AI solutions to perturbed inputs that can cause societal chaos. While AI enhances threat detection and real-time responses, cybercriminals can weaponize it for sophisticated attacks. Therefore, AI developers and engineers should understand the ethical risks and societal damage AI can cause when handled inappropriately. Enterprises leveraging AI models, inferences, and solutions should also care about transparency and data security aspects associated with AI.
What is Cyber Hygiene?
Cyber hygiene is the practice, habit, and day-to-day precautions enterprises, professionals, and individuals follow to maintain a good digital ecosystem to protect against cybercrimes. Just like personal hygiene prevents a human being from illness, cyber hygiene minimizes the chances of getting hacked or compromised. It also prevents enterprises from data breaches, unethical practices, unauthorized access, and deepfake scams.
From a cybersecurity standpoint, various habitual practices help enterprises avoid miscalculations related to cyber threats. Some well-known cybersecurity hygiene practices enable multi-factor authentication with OTP, email verification, passkeys, hardware tokens, and adaptive authentication verifications. Other cyber hygienic habits include strong passwords, updating software regularly, periodic complete scans with antivirus, and not clicking links or downloading files from unsolicited senders.
Importance of Cyber Hygiene with AI
AI is a double-edged sword. It is a blessing and a curse in disguise because although AI-powered tools are excellent at detecting cyber attacks automatically without human intervention, because of human errors and casual cyber habits, attackers find scope to perform advanced attacks such as leaking product keys or other employee details through AI algorithms, generated AI-designed phishing attacks, misuse users’ facial datasets to prepare deepfake scams.
Traditional cyber hygiene will fall short in front of AI-powered attacks. According to Deloitte’s report, 75 percent of deepfakes impersonated a CEO or other C-suite executive. Generative AI will multiply losses from deepfakes and other attacks by 32 percent to 40 billion USD annually by 2027. If enterprise professionals do not stay vigilant while dealing with AI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that impersonation scams cost 12.5 billion USD in 2023 and the numbers will be staggering in the years to come.
Traditional Cyber Hygiene Techniques can be Dangerous
Along with numerous benefits, AI offers some challenges that enterprises can only address by adopting new forms of cyber hygiene. Traditional cyber hygiene might not be effective with new forms of AI-powered cyber attacks. This section will dive deep into it with some contrasting facts.
- Frequently changing passwords as cyber hygiene is not relevant. This traditional approach does not meet the enterprise standards of this AI-powered era because attackers use AI algorithms to crack passwords through pattern recognition.
- Traditional cyber hygiene also taught us about using updated antivirus software. Unpatched or traditional antivirus is also becoming outdated in this AI-driven era. Heuristic scanning and signature-based antivirus have become less effective because of polymorphic AI malware crafted by expert cybercriminal researchers that can change its form to evade detection.
- Enterprise professionals might think that built-in email filters can hunt spamming and phishing emails. But cybercriminals craft AI-generated phishing emails that can bypass these email filters and directly land in your inbox.
Other problematic areas where legacy cyber hygiene becomes obsolete are weak authentication mechanisms, storing credentials in end devices, sharing your PIIs anywhere online, and storing data in databases with weak encryption mechanisms.
Advanced Cyber Hygiene Considering AI as a Tool for Cybercriminals
Enterprises should prepare with AI-powered solutions and cyber hygiene habits to tackle modern, intelligent, and sophisticated cyber threats. Let us explore these well-thought-out cyber habits for the era of AI.
1. Secure AI Training Environment
AI models are internally responsible for generating outcomes when dealing with AI solutions. The datasets engineers provide, the algorithms they write, and the number of training iterations executed – all these factors are responsible for developing an ethical AI. Any malpractice or adversarial injection into datasets or algorithmic design can introduce biases into AI models.
Therefore, AI engineering firms and labs should promote cyber hygiene by incorporating the Zero Trust Framework (ZTF) across all networks. AI development firms should also ensure cyber hygiene by enforcing AI-driven Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions to eliminate threats in real time.
2. Integrity in Cloud-based Model Training
Today, cloud services are more common than ever. From storing datasets for AI modeling to intensive computational power, everything needed for AI runs on the cloud. Experts consider it a good practice to leverage private clouds for AI model training and inference development. Most AI modeling uses customer data or dummy datasets that can be sensitive to business growth. Keeping them confidential is a priority.
Private clouds do not have shared tenants, thus making the servers and storage secure. Choosing the right cloud service providers and setting up security configurations is essential for cloud-based GPU services for AI development.
3. Additional Security Through AI-powered Solutions
MFAs and strong passwords are not enough for cyber hygiene in the era of AI. AI can use deepfake to mimic biometrics and user behavior, bypassing MFA. Attackers can also decode password patterns and break long passwords using GPU-powered intelligent brute force algorithms. That is where advanced methodologies and AI can come to the rescue.
Implementing AI-powered end-point security and behavioral multi-factor authentication such as keystroke dynamics and mouse movement-based user analysis will secure and robust cyber hygiene. AI-enhanced threat detection and response systems can safeguard individuals’ accounts and online services from cyber thefts.
4. Keep Your Data Personal
Traditionally, data privacy experts and security professionals advise everyone not to provide their data online unless desperately required. It is still valid. In addition, enterprise professionals should know that attackers can use AI algorithms to scrape personal data from the deep web and open-source online portals.
To anticipate such automated data scraping problems, it is good cyber hygiene to check for SSL and encryption while using any website or portal. Again, the use of automated data masking and anonymization algorithms can help individuals and professionals prevent from giving their data and online behavior.
5. Continuous Monitoring and Auditing
Poisoning AI models and adding noisy data to the datasets is a popular attack cybercriminals perform on AI training. Therefore, it is good cyber hygiene to monitor intrusion constantly and ensure that the AI model training and inference operate securely and ethically.
Again, AI developers can also implement explainable AI (XAI) during auditing to comprehend model decisions and check data integrity and noise. Monitoring and auditing also help eliminate biases, vulnerabilities in AI-based server systems, and adversarial attacks.
6. Advanced data backup
Another cyber hygiene pointer that enterprises should ponder is leveraging data backups. However, in the era of advanced AI-powered cybercrime, data backup across different servers can be problematic, especially in case of weak in-transit data encryption. Thus, enterprises should leverage real-time AI-powered checks for data in transit.
It will help professionals figure out any integrity violations for data during backup and restoration. Intelligent data backup is also a cyber hygiene technique that harnesses the power of AI and network transmission intelligence to safeguard invaluable enterprise assets. It ensures uninterrupted operations and peace of mind for organizations of all sizes.
Awareness Training, Mock Drills, and Educating Employees
Apart from all the modern strategies and mechanisms used for cyber hygiene, enterprises with governments should also take the initiative to deliver awareness training about cyber hygiene considering the modern threats like deepfakes, spear phishing, automated PII scrapping, and AI-based sophisticated social engineering attacks. Furthermore, mock drills are essential to give employees real-life exposure to such attack vectors. Companies and governments of different nations should also invite security experts to educate employees and individuals on these cyber hygiene verticals. The future of cyber hygiene lies in federated learning, XAI, and the introduction of AI regulations through international treaties and standardization bodies for AI-powered solutions.
Conclusion
We hope this article provided a crisp idea of cyber hygiene and how AI has already changed the landscape. That is why enterprises should shift from legacy cyber hygiene principles and best practices to advanced and agile methodologies. In an era where AI-powered attacks and the misuse of intelligent algorithms are common, cyber hygiene is no longer optional.
The intersection of AI and cybersecurity along with human understanding of modern threats can address various challenges and build hygiene and harmony across digital ecosystems. Individuals and organizations must adopt a forward-thinking, proactive approach to protect their digital presence through cyber hygiene techniques. The article also highlighted modern cyber hygiene principles that enterprises can adopt to build a resilient digital future.
Ready to Build a cyber Resilient Future? contact us today for a consultation and discover how VE3 can help you achieve unparalleled cyber resiliency.