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Artificial Intelligence-Based Cybercrime

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made swift progress in recent years, becoming much more pervasive in the lives of ordinary citizens. Many of the advances in AI have already led to exciting capabilities: intelligent agents on smartphones (Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana), intelligent voice interaction devices in the home (Amazon’s Echo) and countless interactive toys for children. Other upcoming advances are even more impactful, from self-driving cars to learning robots (Pinto & Gupta, 2015) and intelligent systems that automate the jobs of white-collar professionals. In fact, much has been written about the dangers of automation in terms of job losses (McKinsey&Company, 2017). Others fear even more wholesale threats to society, a dystopian future where super-intelligent robots enslave the relatively inferior humans (Barrat, 2013). Much of the AI-fear is driven by the prospects of superintelligent AI agents (ASI – artificial superintelligence), agents so intelligent that humans will be as powerless against them as are ants against a human farmer. The literature on AI dangers focuses mostly on the unintentional dangers of AI developing into an ASI agent of destruction or danger, not because it develops a goal to kill us, but because it sees no problem in killing us in pursuit of a goal we designed it for (Bostrom, 2014). Although fears of super-intelligent AI might be justified at some point, and although humanity needs to plan for the time and the manner in which ASI will be deployed (Bostrom, 2014), researchers have widely divergent views of when ASI agents will become reality (Walsh, 2018). Many experts are not even willing to speculate when ASI will arrive (Ford, 2018). In the meantime, a more immediate threat arises from not-yet-super-intelligent but already available AI: the ability of human attackers to use nonASI systems to automate, enable and enhance cybercrime as we know it, as well as the ability to open totally new channels for cybercrime. Whether the long-term threat of ASI will materialize, the immediate threat of criminals using AI for cybercrime today needs to be considered – and is the focus of this article. While focusing only on current AI capabilities, not on super-intelligent agents that are likely to emerge in the more distant future, we also focus only on intentional malicious uses of AI, not on dangers arising from unintentional consequences or on malfunction of AI systems. Neither do we discuss the threat of AI weapons, including autonomous or intelligent ones. Such systems are intended to create harm, and they can obviously be used for that purpose, whether by a legitimate authority or by a nefarious group. Even after limiting the scope as described above, the range of capabilities of AI for achieving nefarious purposes is vast, at least as extensive if not more so than the range of capabilities for beneficial ones. Within this vast range of possibilities, we classify AI cybercrime into three general and loosely overlapping areas: using AI to commit cybercrime online, using AI via new cybercrime channels that Artificial Intelligence-Based Cybercrime