Application of ChatGPT in Cybersecurity
Hey, folks! Welcome to yet another edition of All Things AppSec. Let’s talk about one of the hottest topics now (no points for guessing which one): ChatGPT!
Specifically, let’s talk about how ChatGPT can be beneficial for cybersecurity.
While AI has been a part of cybersecurity for some time, Open AI’s ChatGPT has created a tidal wave because of how user friendly it was when compared to the existing enterprise grade technologies.
From using it to write an instruction guide for removing peanut butter sandwiches from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible to launching large scale phishing attacks, ChatGPT can be used in different domains for different purposes.
Let’s look at some of the ways ChatGPT can be used for the benefit of cybersecurity:
Threat Detection:
One of the most significant benefits of ChatGPT is its ability to detect potential threats in real-time. By analyzing large amounts of data, including network traffic, social media, and email, ChatGPT can identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate a cyber attack is underway. For instance, it can be trained to recognize phishing emails by analyzing their content, including the sender's email address, links, and attachments. This can help organizations quickly identify and respond to potential threats before they cause significant damage.
Incident Response:
ChatGPT can assist in the incident response process by providing real-time recommendations and instructions to security teams. For instance, during a ransomware attack, ChatGPT can help security teams to contain the attack by identifying the affected systems and providing instructions on how to isolate them from the rest of the network. This can prevent the spread of the ransomware and minimize the impact of the attack.
Fraud Detection:
It can analyze user behavior and detect potential fraud, such as credit card fraud or identity theft. For instance, ChatGPT can monitor transactions and flag suspicious activity, such as a user attempting to make a purchase from a new location or a user making an unusually large purchase. This can help prevent financial losses and protect user data.
Assisted Security Analysis:
With ChatGPT's help, security analysts can quickly identify security threats in the wild, share that information more widely and quickly, and eventually take action to reduce the exposure to those threats. AI provides the unique ability to crunch large amounts of data that is not possible for a human. By taking advantage of this ability ChatGPT can speed up the work performed by a security analyst.
Alleviate the Resource Crunch:
Companies all around the world deal with the shortage of cybersecurity personnel on a daily basis and perhaps for years to come. It will be necessary to be able to rely on highly autonomous and intelligent tools. ChatGPT can provide the necessary resources for such a transition.
Remediation:
Often times we receive generic remediation steps for a problem we may face. By fine-tuning ChatGPT with your own security data sets, you can improve the details and accuracy of such remediation steps to meet your needs, thus creating much better remediation plans.
Plugins:
ChatGPT allows vendors to create plugins integrated with their own application. This opens up a door to create functionalities for their use cases. For instance, a plug-in can be created to filter through large amounts of data and find specific insights, maybe from the vulnerability results of an application over a timeframe. ChatGPT can be utilised to fetch required information, such as most common vulnerabilities, from the results and thus perform the sorting procedure for you.
ChatGPT has been around only for a few months, and we’ve already seen myriad use cases being explored as well as it being put to use in a majority of them.
It is obvious that we’ll see ChatGPT in more and more aspects of cybersecurity.
If the bad actors are using it to derail our security, why not use it to avoid such a predicament altogether?