Criminal Use of Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence is on a lot of minds lately. There is the scare scenario when it is thought intelligent machines will realize they have no use for humans and decide to wipe us out. There is also the scenario where intelligent machines take all our jobs away. Then there is the scenario where smart weapons driven by artificial intelligence decide to turn on all of us. While these things could be a possibility there is something else which is happening now and not many people are talking about it. Crime and criminals have always been a problem since the first time several humans existed at the same time and one of them wanted what on of the others had. Crime does not stand still it also advances in technology in the same way industry does, because of this we should be looking at crimes where artificial intelligence was used and try and prevent it in the future. This advanced type of crime is becoming a big problem for police agencies all over the world. You just can’t trust the voice on the other side of the phone even if it sounds exactly like someone you know. The CEO of a large company in the United Kingdom found this out the hard way. He believed he was talking on the phone with an executive from his company and performed a fund transfer for the equivalent of 243,000 dollars. It turned out the executive never called him; it was a criminal using voice imitation software which was set to sound exactly like the executive. Did you ever hear of Ransomware? It is a program created by criminals which gets on your computer and locks you out. The criminals then ask for money to unlock your computer and if you don’t pay, they threaten to erase all your data. If you have everything backed up there is no problem, but it is amazing how many people and companies do not have all their data backed up. Many of these people pay, thus fueling the scheme. As bad as this is the next new wave of Ransomware may be driven by Artificial Intelligence or AI. The AI will burrow down into the computers getting past places where they could only have dreamed of and things could get a lot worse. A test was conducted a couple of years ago. It was conducted by computer scientists. The idea was to see who or what would could convince people to click on links in email and webpages. Normally it is not smart to click on an unknown link in an email and such, and many people won’t but some always will. It turned out when the human side of the experiment tried to convince people to click on links, they couldn’t equal the amount of links clicked on which were created by artificial intelligence. This should tell us something which is, pardon the pun, artificial intelligence is smart and able to study our habits better than humans. How do criminals get the source code for AI so that they can manipulate it into a weapon? There is a rumor going around which should scare everyone. It states three anti-virus companies were hacked and the code for their AI programs stolen. It is also said security plug-ins were taken. There is no mention of the companies, but I am sure if this happened these companies will never admit it. How would it look for an anti-virus company to admit this? It is believed this is more than just a rumor and some experts are claiming over 30 terabytes of data was taken. One of the things the IT security industry fears the most is an entirely new type of smart attack software. There has been a change in what it targets recently. While home computers are still targets, the criminals are going after more lucrative targets such as cities and large corporations, including banks. As Willie Sutton the famous bank robber once said when asked why rob banks he said because that is where the money was. Today the money in the form of personal data is everywhere and, in some places, weakly protected or not protected at all. The criminal law has not kept up with our way of doing things today and this makes things even worse. Companies have no incentive for investing in heavy encryption because they know if they are hacked, they are not financially responsible. There are just so many examples of this. Criminals are trying to build software programs which will eliminate their having to spend days, weeks and months trying to hack a target company. The idea is to develop a piece of software which used artificial intelligence and can run on its own without human intervention. This means the criminals could launch thousands of these malicious software programs and just sit back and reap the profits. We just can’t afford to let this happen. Things are bad enough now. The governments of the world develop these types of programs to be used by government agencies on enemy states. Just a few years ago one of the programs which was used by the United States was released over the internet and was able to knock out the centrifuges in Iran without doing damage to any home computers. I guess this could have been considered to have used Artificial Intelligence. There was another problem however and a software program said to have been developed by a secret American government agency somehow got into the mainstream in the form of a computer virus and did a lot of damage. So, we have a dual problem. We have criminals trying to develop AI controlled software and the government trying to keep their AI derived software out of criminal hands. Is there any solution to any of this which might work? Scientists are saying the answer is Quantum computing. They believe encryption created on a Quantum computer cannot be broken. I personally have heard statements like this too many times only to see they were wrong. Not only that, but switching the computer systems we use now is a very big job. Did you know the government still uses some computers that use floppy disks? I am talking about those old paper ones we used in the late 1960s. They still haven’t updated all the technology they use to current standards. How can we expect then to suddenly switch to Quantum computers which might cost more money than the entire budget of the United States for ten years? We have a problem in that artificial intelligence is a double edged sword, it can be used for good, but also for bad.
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