According to cybersecurity company Darktrace, there has been a rise in the utilization of artificial intelligence by criminals to develop more intricate scams to deceive workers and gain unauthorized access to organizations, following the launch of ChatGPT.
The firm based in Cambridge noted a 92% decline in operating profits during the second half of the year ending December. It stated that artificial intelligence was facilitating “hacktivist” cyber-attacks that employ ransomware to extort money from enterprises.
“Darktrace has found that while the number of email attacks across its own customer base remained steady since ChatGPT’s release, those that rely on tricking victims into clicking malicious links have declined while linguistic complexity, including text volume, punctuation and sentence length among others, have increased,”
“This indicates that cybercriminals may be redirecting their focus to crafting more sophisticated social engineering scams that exploit user trust.”
the company said
Nonetheless, Darktrace stated that this trend has not led to the emergence of a fresh set of cybercriminals; instead, it has only altered the strategies of the current group.
Darktrace cautioned that it observed a considerable deceleration in companies enlisting its security offerings in the last quarter of the previous year. It connected the decrease in its second-half operating profits in 2022 to a tax charge connected to the allocation of share incentives for its CEO, Poppy Gustafsson, and finance director, Cathy Graham, which required the firm to revise its prediction of available cashflow this year.
Darktrace, which has encountered a flurry of denunciation from short-sellers who remain unconvinced of its ability to accomplish its goal of becoming a potential European powerhouse in the cybersecurity arena dominated by the US, affirmed that it was unperturbed by the recent decline in fresh business.
Gustafsson said, “Despite the decline in new customers, our efforts to maintain existing ones and enhance the value of new and ongoing contracts are yielding results.” She highlighted a 36% YoY revenue growth in the last six months of the year. Despite an arduous macroeconomic environment, Gustafsson emphasized the company’s continued robust revenue growth.
