This New Undetectable Virus Uses ChatGPT To Write Emails To All Your Contacts
Be careful when opening your emails: A new type of computer virus uses artificial intelligence to write messages in a human style and spreads to all your contacts.
A new computer virus has just emerged, dubbed “artificial cancer,” and it’s particularly worrying. And for good reason: it uses artificial intelligence, in this case ChatGPT, to constantly transform itself and spread maliciously, through emails. Above all, it’s undetectable!
What makes this virus so formidable is its ability to constantly mutate. ChatGPT automatically rewrites its code by changing variable names and slightly modifying its logic, allowing it to evade the detection mechanisms of traditional antivirus software. Once a computer is infected, it uses messaging to send emails to all of the victim’s contacts. Since the messages are written by ChatGPT, in a human style, with the name of an existing contact, they appear completely legitimate.
The attack scenario is simple and clever. Imagine that you receive an email from a friend inviting you to his birthday party with an attachment titled 80s_Nostalgia_Playlist. The message is so well-written that you have no reason to suspect that it was actually created by a virus. By opening the attachment, you launch an executable program that allows the virus to install on your computer. From then on, it starts infecting your contacts in the same way, by searching through your messages and address book.
Fortunately, this terrifying virus is not spreading freely in nature: it is still in the laboratory. It was actually developed by David Zollicoffer, a computer science student at ETH Zurich, and Ben Zimmerman, a cybersecurity researcher at Ohio State University, and it shows the extent to which AI can be exploited for malicious purposes. These researchers therefore want to emphasize the urgent need to develop more effective defenses. Other experts, such as Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey, warn that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cyberattacks using AI.
However, all is not so bleak. Zollikofer believes that the same techniques can also be used to strengthen defenses against cyberattacks. By integrating AI into security systems, it is possible to develop more sophisticated methods for detecting and neutralizing threats. The challenge is to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals who exploit these new technologies.