The next generation of malware will use artificial intelligence to simulate the behavior of human attackers: malware will accurately identify its targets, collect all the necessary information about them, choose the most effective attack method, and intelligently avoid detection.
Just as businesses and organizations are leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance security in every sector, cybercriminals have begun to use it to build smarter malware.
This is precisely why a holistic approach to security is required, where solutions for protecting networks, endpoints, applications, data centers and clouds will be inextricably linked and will operate as an integrated and collaborative whole. Artificial intelligence will play a dominant role in this whole, providing automated security, prevention and response to threats.
Implementing such an approach is becoming increasingly imperative as threats become more intelligent and tend to operate autonomously to a greater extent. In the coming year, we expect to see sophisticated malware with adaptive learning capabilities, which will judge the success or failure of ongoing attacks, aiming to improve the effectiveness of the attack techniques they use.
The new generation of malware will be “situation-aware” which means that malware will be able to understand the environment they are in and make calculated decisions about what to do next.
These malware will use sophisticated code, replacing the traditional “if not this, then that” logic with more complex decision trees. Autonomous malware will be able to predict which node in a decision tree is the best, before choosing the path to follow. A predictive node will track which nodes are chosen and which are not, so when the malware encounters a condition it has seen before, it will be able to make a more targeted prediction so that, over time, the software becomes more and more effective.
