The number of reported ransomware attacks have doubled since last year, according to analysis by Barracuda Networks Inc, a cloud-first security solutions provider.

In their Threat Spotlight report covering trends from August 2022 to July 2023, the company noted the increase in ransomware threats could be due to threat actors taking advantage of increased AI capabilities.

Most of what Barracuda found indicates that the threat landscape itself could appear to be relatively unchanged – email is still the most common starting point for ransomware attacks.

By sector, municipality, healthcare, and education organisations had the most amount of attacks, likely due to their forward facing nature and the sensitivity of the data they hold.

Barracuda noted that the advancements of AI, particularly large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT, could be key in the rise of successful ransomware attacks.

Previously, a key marker of a phishing scam was spelling and grammar errors, which can now be eradicated if threat actors employ an LLM to write their emails for them.

The use of AI models will only make it harder for people to tell if an email or message is malicious as they will lack the more obvious signs of grammatical errors.

Further, a SlashNext investigation has revelaed that threat actors are already training LLMs, including ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, for malicious purposes.

These methods have been available on the Dark Web, making phishing attacks easier to produce as the necessary technology becomes more widely accessible.

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The rise of WormGPT and FraudGPT, which claim to be able to write malicious code, create phishing pages, find vulnerabilities and even more, according to SlashNext.

While AI is already improving the effectiveness of traditional cyber-attacks, the increased capabilities of AI can have major implications for the future of cybersecurity.

A recent survey covered by DIGIT found that four in five security leaders consider AI to be their number one threat, both from within and outwith their own company’s use of the emerging technology.