ChatGPT is enabling script kiddies to write functional malware

For a beta, ChatGPT isn’t all that bad at writing fairly decent malware.

Since its beta launch in November, AI chatbot ChatGPT has been used for a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays and planning parties and learning about new topics. Now we can add malware development and the pursuit of other types of cybercrime to the list.

Researchers at security firm Check Point Research reported Friday that within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—some with little or no coding experience—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks. Read More

#chatbots, #cyber

Meta rolls out AI ad-targeting tech in an effort to reduce discrimination

The company promised the system as part of a settlement.

Meta is acting on its vow to reduce ad discrimination through technology. The company is rolling out a Variance Reduction System (VRS) in the US that ensures the real audience for an ad more closely matches the eligible target audience — that is, it shouldn’t skew unfairly toward certain cultural groups. Once enough people have seen an ad, a machine learning system compares the aggregate demographics of viewers with those the marketers intended to reach. It then tweaks the ad’s auction value (that is, the likelihood you’ll see the ad) to display it more or less often to certain groups.

VRS keeps working throughout an ad run. And yes, Meta is aware of the potential privacy issues. It stresses that the system can’t see an individual’s age, gender or estimated ethnicity. Differential privacy tech also introduces “noise” that prevents the AI from learning individual demographic info over time.

The anti-discrimination method will initially apply to the housing ads that prompted the settlement. VRS will reach credit and employment ads in the country over the following year, Meta says. Read More

#diversity

People are already trying to get ChatGPT to write malware

Analysis of chatter on dark web forums shows that efforts are already under way to use OpenAI’s chatbot to help script malware.

The ChatGPT AI chatbot has created plenty of excitement in the short time it has been available and now it seems it has been enlisted by some in attempts to help generate malicious code.

ChatGPT is an AI-driven natural language processing tool which interacts with users in a human-like, conversational way. Among other things, it can be used to help with tasks like composing emails, essays and code Read More

#chatbots, #cyber

Unstructured Data Challenges for 2023 and their Solutions

Unstructured data is information that does not have a pre-defined structure. It’s one of the three core data types, along with structured and semi-structured formats.

Examples of unstructured data include call logs, chat transcripts, contracts, and sensor data, as these datasets are not arranged according to a preset data model. Unstructured data must be standardized and structured into columns and rows to make it machine-readable, i.e., ready for analysis and interpretation. This makes managing unstructured data difficult. Read More

#data-science