US adversaries using AI for offensive cyber operations: Microsoft

U.S. adversaries are using artificial intelligence (AI) for offensive cyber operations, according to a Microsoft report published Wednesday.

The report, compiled in collaboration with its business partner, OpenAI, said Microsoft disrupted threats aimed to exploit the AI technology the company itself developed.

“Cybercrime groups, nation-state threat actors, and other adversaries are exploring and testing different AI technologies as they emerge, in an attempt to understand potential value to their operations and the security controls they may need to circumvent,” the company wrote in the summary of the report.

Hacking groups from four countries present a significant concern to Western cybersecurity, according to the report. It laid out the activity of two Chinese government-affiliated hacking groups, along with others from North Korea, Iran and Russia. 

North Korea’s hackers used AI to conduct research on the nation’s military strengths and weaknesses.

An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps team experimented with AI to find a way to not be detected.

Forest Blizzard, a Russian military intelligence actor linked to the country’s intelligence gathering agency, the GRU, researched radar and satellite technologies for possible connections to military operations in Ukraine.

And Charcoal Typhoon, a Chinese state-affiliated threat actor, has used large language models (LLMs) to support “tooling development, scripting, understanding various commodity cybersecurity tools, and for generating content that could be used to social engineer targets.” 

Microsoft disabled access to the tool by these groups. The company also said it would share information about the use of other tools, in which cases it would notify its creators. 

Microsoft added that it had not identified, in collaboration with OpenAI, any major attacks using LLMs.

The Associated Press contributed.