Experts warn small businesses of threat of relying on Artificial Intelligence

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a useful tool to assist freelancers and small businesses, cybersecurity experts warn that it can compromise businesses. This was shown by a survey carried out by Bitfender, which highlighted that 96% of professionals consider generative AI a threat.

Thus, misusing tools like ChatGPT in business could compromise your data. The use of Artificial Intelligence to create or manipulate misleading content is also another threat, considered serious by more than a third of cybersecurity experts, and the use of AI can also cause a significant amount of mistrust from users, thus threatening your reputation, and the use of AI tools to scrape information and data could infringe copyright and intellectual property rights, leading to significant lawsuits.

Andrei Florescu, president of Bitfender, assessed that “companies in all sectors have to face unprecedented challenges posed by an increasing attack surface, zero-day vulnerabilities, cloud configuration errors and new emerging threats driven by Artificial Intelligence.”

Another issue that the Bitfender report highlighted is the sophistication that phishing is acquiring among cybercriminals. This is one of the techniques that self-employed people and businesses suffer the most from, and one of the main reasons why their data or that of their clients is stolen.

In addition to this fact, the Bitfender report showed how business data breaches continue to increase year after year. In this sense, more than half of all respondents, 57%, experienced a data breach or leak in the last 12 months, 6% more than the previous year when they were asked the same question.

Finally, cybersecurity professionals considered that the biggest challenge currently for SMEs in terms of cybersecurity lies in compliance and data regulations, which many freelancers and small businesses must take into account to avoid sanctions, although they often do not have the means to do so.

The latest statistics from the National Cybersecurity Institute (Incibe) speak of losses of between 2,000 and 50,000 euro for small businesses that suffer cyberattacks. This is because SMEs are at the centre of the target of digital criminals, who increasingly attack their computers and mobile devices in search of relevant information.

Within this growing environment of cyber threats, which self-employed workers and small businesses face on a daily basis, the incidence of what is known as keyloggers (malicious programs that record everything that is typed on a device) has been already one of the main concerns. Along with spyware (spy programs that collect device information and forward it without the consent of its owner).

Recent European laws dictate that content created with AI must be declared as such to try to limit the lack of trust created for consumers. Recent scientific experiments reveal that consumers gain this mistrust, even when they do not know they are consuming AI generated content.