Artificial Intelligence: How it Can Target Your Firm's Cybersecurity Defenses

• Citation: Vol. 49 No. 4
• Publication year: 2024
• Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence: How it Can Target Your Firm's Cybersecurity Defenses Vol. 49 No. 4 Pg. 24 Vermont Bar Journal January 2024

by Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., John W. Simek, and Michael C. Maschke

Artificial Intelligence: How it Can Target Your Firm’s Cybersecurity Defenses

AI is Bright and Shiny: It is Also Lethal to Law Firm Security

Lawyers have rapidly gravitated toward using artificial intelligence. Indeed, AI can be very useful. But there is a dark side to AI. In the wrong hands, AI can be a deadly foe of law firm security.

In general, AI cyberattacks are more sophisticated and harder to spot. And AI is continually growing more sophisticated, complicating the problem. While "good" AI is part of most law firms these days, the "bad" AI is always improving and often several steps ahead of the "good" AI. That is further complicated by the oft-cited precept that, in cybersecurity, the bad guys outnumber the good guys 100-1.

AI Loves to Go Phishing

We teach cybersecurity awareness training to lawyers frequently - the advent of AI utilization in phishing attacks has caused us to revise some of our training. These days, AI is far more likely to produce phishing attacks which contain no misspellings and no grammatical errors. AI may well...