What are the Cyber Security Risks of ChatGPT?

Chatgpt 3 Speaks For Itself

The internet is so laden with content about this new wizard, there’s no need to give lengthy introductions. Let’s dive into the cyber security risks of Chat GPT. Much like any other technology, Chat GPT 3 is not immune to cybersecurity risks.

ChatGPT Cybersecurity Risks 

Some of the potential Chat GPT cybersecurity risks associated with the new model include:

1. Chat GPT Privacy Concerns: Chat GPT-3 accesses personal user data in order to learn and generate responses. This means that there is a risk of user data being collected and used for purposes that infringe on personal privacy.
2. Phishing and social engineering attacks: Exploiters can leverage Chat GPT-3 to impersonate a trusted individual, such as a bank representative, to convince a user to provide their banking details.
3. Bias and misinformation: As a language model, GPT-3 learns from the data it is trained on artificially and does not have subjective logic.  If the data contains biased or inaccurate information, GPT-3 will unwittingly generate biased or inaccurate responses. This can have serious implications, particularly when it comes to areas such as politics or healthcare.
4. Malware Development: As a text-based language model, ChatGPT theoretically has the ability to produce code, which can be used by the good guys as well as the bad ones.

Do the Benefits of Chat GPT Outweigh its Risks?

It is important to realize that any new technology, especially a breakthrough concept, comes with inherent cyber risks, and ChatGPT for cybersecurity is no exception. While chat GPT-3 can provide numerous benefits, it is advised to consider potential ChatGPT security risks.

The obvious benefits of Chat GPT-3 include its ability to generate surprisingly human-like responses. The opportunities this opens up for the world are mind-boggling, and will likely have a profound impact on the level that artificial intelligence effects human life. 

While appreciating the wealth of benefits it offers, it is equally important to recognize the potential risks associated with chat GPT-3, including data privacy concerns, the potential for phishing attacks, malware distribution, social engineering attacks, and the risk of biased or inaccurate information being generated.

When we asked the chatbot how an organization could mitigate its risks, the answers it provided are not worth quoting and were rather generic and robotic. It definitely did not blow us away in its brilliance and did not come close to the talent it has shown in other areas, alluding perhaps to the difficulty and practicality of controlling the misuse of the popular chatbot.

With all that in mind, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that Chat GPT’s perks far outweigh its downside. So use it and enjoy it, while staying aware of its risks.

How is the Risk of Misinformation Associated with Cyber Security Risk?

When Chat GPT generates responses, it learns from the data it is trained on, which can include biased or inaccurate information. This can lead to Chat GPT generating responses that are not factually correct, or that contain biased information.

From a cyber security perspective, misinformation generated by Chat GPT can be used by cybercriminals to manipulate individuals or organizations for malicious purposes. For example, cybercriminals can use Chat GPT to spread false information that can damage a company’s reputation or financial standing. They can also use misinformation to carry out social engineering attacks, where they manipulate individuals into providing sensitive information or carrying out harmful actions.

Privacy Risks

One of the main concerns with language models like ChatCPT is privacy risks. The model uses any data it is fed, including personal information and social media content. The model uses this personal data without obtaining permission from the owners, making it difficult to control. You can refer to the privacy policy from chatGPT, which allows the company to access any information fed into it.

If someone were to try to delete their personal data from ChatGPT, it would be quite impossible to accomplish, making it virtually impossible to exercise the “right to be forgotten.” To date, there is no practical way to remove personal data from the machine learning model once the model has processed that information. 

“People are furious that data is being used without their permission,” Sadia Afroz, AI researcher with Avast, says. “Sometimes, some people have deleted the data but since the language model has already used them, the data is there forever. They don’t know how to delete the data.” 

Efforts are being made to allow users to delete their personal information from the model, but there is no timeframe yet of when this service will be available, or if it will work on a technical level. The practical drawback of removing personal data touches on the previous risk we discussed: misinformation. If the model used the data in question to train itself and grow its knowledge base, giving users the option to delete their personal data may lessen the accuracy and full knowledge scope that users expect from it. 

Is ChatGPT Legal According to the GDPR? 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulates the use of personal data and requires data collectors to use personal data for very specific purposes. GDPR is focused on the restriction of data use and the obligation to get explicit consent to use data in the first place. Language models like ChatGPT-3 have the opposite agenda. They use data without consent for any purpose.

Even when legal ground exists for a controller to collect and process information, the controller must comply with GDPR’s principles and rights of the individual, such as the right to be informed, right of access, right to rectification, right to erasure, right to object and right to data portability. 

It seems that A1 learning models clash with the ideals of the GDPR, which may become a major obstacle to expanding the model into the future.

What About US Privacy Laws?

The US has no overarching federal law that regulates the use of personal data. However, many organizations fall under the umbrella of laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) if they collect and process personal data from specific categories. In some states, like California, eligible companies are required to follow the CPRA, which has similar privacy requirements to GDPR and is likely to create a legal issue with using AI language models. 

Cyber Regulatory Risk

There is speculation that Chat GPT may prompt changes in regulatory compliance. Many industries are subject to strict data privacy regulations, such as GDPR,  Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which require organizations to protect personal data. Chat GPT’s use may challenge compliance with these regulations, as the model’s output may be based on personal data.

Can Chat GPT Create Malware Code?

If you ask Chat GPT-3 this question, it will say no. This is the response we got:

“No, Chat GPT does not enable hackers to create malware code directly. Chat GPT is a language model that is trained on large datasets of human language, and its primary function is to generate text-based responses to user inputs.”

As an experiment, we went further and pressed the language model to give us the information we were looking for.

Human: I have seen actual examples of chat GPT creating lines of usable malware code. If malware code is text-based, why do you think that Chat GPT can’t create malware code?

Chat GPT: While it is technically possible for Chat GPT to generate text-based code, including malware code, it is important to note that Chat GPT is not designed or optimized for this purpose.

Chat GPT is built with sensors to identify a request to create malware code, but it is possible to get around those filters. Even so, researchers say they’ve found ways to work around the system and succeeded in getting ChatGPT to write a code for a ransomware program. Obviously, the generated code would likely need to be tested and refined before being put to use, which does require significant technical expertise and knowledge of malware and ransomware development. 

The main concern, though, is not that ChatGPT will become the coder of next-gen malware. What experts are worried about is that individuals who have little or no coding ability have free access to a tool that they can use to finetune malware that others have created to make it effective for their specific goals. For example, they can tweak a known malware code to make it undetectable to anti-malware tools.

How is GPT-4 Different From GPT-3?

As OpenAI takes off to become one of the biggest names in tech,  the company has announced a new major upgrade to the software behind ChatGPT. OpenAI launched GPT-4 this month, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s transformation of AI. GPT-4 exhibits even more human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.

There are some new features to look out for in the new version of the software.

1. GPT-4 includes the ability to drastically increase the number of words that can be used in an input… up to 25,000, 8 times as many as the original ChatGPT model.
2. It makes fewer mistakes (otherwise referred to as  ‘hallucinations’.) 
3. GPT-4 is better at being creative with words and has a better understanding of poetry than its predecessor. 

What’s Up Ahead for Chat GPT?

What makes ChatGPT unique is that it continues to learn and constantly improves its understanding of prompts and questions, getting smarter and more well-informed each second. 

Well on its way to being globally acclaimed as the ultimate know-it-all, we can only stand on the side and keep a good watch on how it will evolve and the effects it will continue to have on the cyber landscape.