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Microsoft has utilised ChatGPT to create a cyber security assistant tool to aid security teams in identifying threats and breaches and analysing data.
Using OpenAI’s most recent version of everyone’s favourite artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT-4, the tool titled “Security Copilot” uses a Microsoft security-specific model fed over 65 trillion signals daily, developing its “growing set of security-specific skills”.
The tool then works with cyber security professionals as a prompt box that they can use for task summaries, information sharing and vulnerability analysis.
“Today, the odds remain stacked against cyber security professionals. Too often, they fight an asymmetric battle against relentless and sophisticated attackers,” said Microsoft security corporate vice-president Vasu Jakkal.
“With Security Copilot, we are shifting the balance of power into our favor. Security Copilot is the first and only generative AI security product enabling defenders to move at the speed and scale of AI.”
With Security Copilot, Microsoft intends to treat several of the issues currently facing the cyber industry, such as the talent gap that has seen many security teams under-equipped to deal with threats.
“A security team’s capacity will always be limited by the team’s size and the natural limits of human attention,” added Jakkal.
“Security Copilot boosts your defenders’ skills with its ability to answer security-related questions — from the basic to the complex.”
On top of this, the AI tool will be able to respond to certain incidents much faster than human security workers and catch what they may miss.
The use of ChatGPT and other AI tools for cyber security purposes has been heavily discussed over the last few months.
Jeff Pollard, principal analyst and vice-president at Forrester, has said that AI tools could be leveraged by security workers.
“I do think there is an aspect of looking at what it’s doing now, and it’s not that hard to see a future where you could take a SOC analyst that maybe has less experience, hasn’t seen as much and they’ve got something like this sitting alongside them that helps them communicate the information, maybe helps them understand or contextualise it, maybe it offers insights about what to do next,” he said.
Organisations other than Microsoft have trailed the use of ChatGPT to improve their security offerings, such as cloud security organisation Orca, which has said that it uses ChatGPT to upgrade the remediation steps given to customers.
However, ChatGPT has been proven to be a double-edged sword, a tool that, while able to assist security works, is also able to assist threat actors.
Researchers from Check Point Research discovered that the older ChatGPT-3.5 AI was able to create convincing phishing emails as well as generate actual malicious code.
OpenAI has said that ChatGPT is currently a research preview and that it hopes to continue adding improvements to prevent it from being used for malicious means by cyber criminals.
Other security issues have arisen of late, with chat histories between users and the bot being leaked due to a bug just last week.
If security researchers were using ChatGPT to assist in their investigations and the data was compromised, this could have dire consequences.
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