How to improve your startup’s cybersecurity with ChatGPT
Daniel Levi
Posted On July 12, 2023
The Artificial Intelligence hype might be at its peak, but this technology has been widely used in cyber security for years. It’s integral for streamlining processes that have to be automated. The technology is also the key to extensive data analysis in real-time.
When discussing Artificial Intelligence nowadays, most people think of the user-friendly chatbot, ChatGPT. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just help with writing essays and cover letters. It can also be useful in improving your security processes.
While ChatGPT can’t be directly used to strengthen security since it wasn’t built as a security tool, it can give you some interesting ideas and teach you to think like a cybercriminal going after your organization.
Let’s dive into how to utilize ChatGPT to strengthen your security.
Fighting Against Phishing and Improving Awareness Training
Phishing, as the most common kind of cybercrime, has been a prevailing problem for both individuals and companies in various industries. Chat GPT can aid with the analysis of phishing emails or help you create better phishing awareness training.
Most phishing emails end up in your spam folder. However, some will still get through and land in your inbox. Security teams can use ChatGPT to inspect suspicious emails.
ChatGPT can be trained to recognize whether something is suspicious about the URL in an email, such as the phrasing and the email address itself.
Phishing awareness training is a must for any company. You can useChatGPT to:
- Simplify the concepts for non-tech users
- Create realistic phishing scenarios
- Transform otherwise dry and boring training — gamify the experience or create interesting quizzes
Creating Strategies For Red Teaming Exercises
Organizations that already have layered cyber security and teams that are dedicated to the continual improvement of security need to test their people and systems regularly.
These regular assessments give valuable insight into how ready employees are in case of an actual attack.
One way to test both security systems and security teams is with red teaming. That is a cyber security exercise that separates the teams into two groups:
- A red team that acts as an adversary and has to attack the system
- The blue team is often not aware that the exercise is taking place but has to figure out that the system is under attack and prompt mitigate the threat.
ChatGPT can give you some ideas on the strategy that could be used for a red teamer. It can build simple examples of scripts a penetration tester might use that you may not have thought of. It can also debug scripts that may not be working as expected.
Helping Businesses Meet Compliance
While meeting compliance does not equal having a secure company, compliance is something every organization must adhere to — especially those that gather and manage a lot of sensitive customer data. How can ChatGPT help you achieve security compliance?
When you’re drafting the documents and framework that determine the strategy and necessary points that a security posture has to meet to achieve compliance, ChatGPT can offer you insights on:
- How to improve existing security policies
- How to better automate security audits
- What are the best practices within the industry are
- What are some of the key requirements that you have to meet according to law
- How to better implement security controls
If you’re willing to share more with the ChatGPT, it can also give you more concrete suggestions on how to remediate certain issues as well as help you detect non-compliance.
Teaching Developers to Code With Security in Mind
The jobs of developers and security are usually separate and conflicting. Developers work hard to meet tight deadlines and release products as soon as they can. Security halts the process and delays the release further — until the product is secure.
Some companies encourage a more collaborative approach between these two teams. Other companies procrastinate security audits.
ChatGPT can’t make peace between the two groups, but it can teach developers to code with security in mind. For example, ChatGPT can educate new developers on the best security practices they need to know while coding.
It can simplify the security standards that they need to meet while coding. Also, it can suggest how they can find specific vulnerabilities in their own code.
Depending on how much data a developer shares, it can give them general or specific feedback on how to improve the code (make it more secure) in real-time. As a result, developers know the security principles they have to follow in every stage of app development.
How Can ChatGPT Assist in Cyber Security?
As ChatGPT will repeatedly tell you, it’s just a language model with limited possibilities.
While AI is powerful and has impressive capabilities, at the end of the day, it’s a tool that we’re still learning about, just as it’s learning from our input.
Some of the capabilities of ChatGPT that can benefit cyber security are the analysis of phishing emails, improving phishing awareness training, meeting compliance, teaching developers the best security practices for their code, or generating strategies for a red team.
It could also be used for threat hunting and refined analysis of data. However, it’s up to you to decide whether that is a good idea for your company.
ChatGPT saves every input for training purposes. With every new message, it knows more about your company. Also, it collects the personal information of its users.
Recently, it came to light that this AI-powered chat was hacked, and the data of over 100,000 accounts were released on the dark web.
Therefore, be careful of what kind of data you feed the chat. Avoid copy-pasting any text or code that might contain personal information about your company or users as well as the details about the security posture that you want to keep confidential.
