Exploring and Mitigating AI-Driven Cybercrime

From the boardroom to your go-to news podcast, conversations about the availability of and use cases for AI are everywhere. It's no surprise why AI innovations and their surrounding excitement are ubiquitous: AI has undoubtedly improved society in many ways, ranging from increasing business efficiencies to generating better outcomes in sectors like healthcare and education.

Cybersecurity practitioners benefit from AI, using this technology to enhance threat detection and response times by automating anomaly and vulnerability detection. Teams also use AI-driven cybersecurity tools to predict and prevent attacks by analyzing patterns and adopting evolving threats.

Conversely, the growing cybercrime market is thriving on cheap and accessible wins. As AI evolves, it's already lowering the barrier to entry for aspiring cybercriminals, increasing access to the tactics and intelligence needed to execute successful attacks regardless of an adversary's knowledge. In addition to enhancing accessibility, AI enables malicious actors to create more believable phishing threats, complete with context-aware and regionalized language.

The AI-Enabled Cybercrime Project

While defenders navigate a changing threat landscape in which attackers continually identify new ways to harness AI for their benefit, collaborating across public sectors, industries, and borders is crucial to developing new strategies and practices to combat AI-driven cybercrime. Fortinet is proud to work with the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab (BRSL), and other public and private sector organizations on a new effort: AI-Enabled Cybercrime: Exploring Risks, Building Awareness, and Guiding Policy Responses. CLTC was established in 2015 as a research and collaboration hub at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as a convening platform and bridge between academic research and the needs of decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society relating to the future of security. BRSL at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy is an academic research institute focused on the intersection of technology and security. The lab conducts analytical research and designs and fields wargames.

This latest effort, AI-Enabled Cybercrime, is a structured set of tabletop exercises (TTXs), surveys, workshops, and interviews that will take place over the next nine months, engaging subject matter experts worldwide and sharing findings in a public-facing report and follow-on presentations. The project will simulate real-world scenarios to uncover the dynamics of AI-powered cybercrime and develop forward-looking defense strategies. This effort will help decision-makers in policy and industry navigate the changing nature of cybersecurity, support the development of proactive AI-enabled cybercrime prevention strategies, and inform public policy decisions.

The initiative begins December 17 with a scenario-based TTX conducted at UC Berkeley. Cybersecurity professionals, academic experts, local government officials, and law enforcement representatives will explore generative AI tools like those used to create believable phishing scams and how they catalyze cybercrime.

Follow-up workshops are planned in Singapore and Israel in the first half of next year. The cumulative findings from these workshops will be shared in a public report scheduled for release in the summer of 2025.

Partnering with UC Berkeley to Strengthen Our Collective Defenses

In addition to the AI-Enabled Cybercrime initiative, Fortinet has worked with UC Berkeley's CLTC on other projects to help entities worldwide prepare for future cybersecurity challenges. Last year, Fortinet collaborated with the CLTC and other organizations on its Cybersecurity Futures 2030 effort to help leaders across the public and private sectors examine future-focused scenarios and consider how digital security will change in the coming years.

The Cybersecurity Futures 2030 inaugural report, Cybersecurity Futures 2030: New Foundations, which was published last December, includes insights from six global workshops with insights on how technological, political, economic, and environmental changes will impact the future of cybersecurity for governments and organizations and how leaders should start to prepare. Fortinet participated in the Washington, D.C. working session, taking part in a hands-on workshop that included analysis across different geographies and scenario planning for 2030.

Collaboration Is Table Stakes for Disrupting Global Cybercrime

As our adversaries take advantage of new technologies and we assess and adjust our strategies, it's clear that partnerships strengthen our collective ability to navigate the evolving threat landscape proactively. Ongoing cooperation across industries and borders is a vital component of successfully dismantling sophisticated cybercrime operations, and there are many powerful examples of existing collaborations that are already combatting cybercrime in a meaningful way.

Dismantling cybercrime operations and adversaries' attack infrastructure is everyone's responsibility; no organization can achieve this alone. By working together and regularly sharing intelligence and response strategies, we can force cybercriminals to start over, rebuild, and shift their tactics, disrupting their activities and making our digital world safer.