'Since its beta launch in November, AI chatbot ChatGPT has been used for a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays and planning parties and learning about new topics. Now we can add malware development and the pursuit of other types of cybercrime to the list. Researchers at security firm Check Point Research reported Friday that within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—some with little or no coding experience—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks. “It’s still too early to decide whether or not ChatGPT capabilities will become the new favorite tool for participants in the Dark Web,” company researchers wrote. “However, the cybercriminal community has already shown significant interest and are jumping into this latest trend to generate malicious code.” Last month, one forum participant posted what they claimed was the first script they had written and credited the AI chatbot with providing a “nice [helping] hand to finish the script with a nice scope.” The Python code combined various cryptographic functions, including code signing, encryption, and decryption. One part of the script generated a key using elliptic curve cryptography and the curve ed25519 for signing files. Another part used a hard-coded password to encrypt system files using the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms. A third used RSA keys and digital signatures, message signing, and the blake2 hash function to compare various files. The result was a script that could be used to (1) decrypt a single file and append a message authentication code (MAC) to the end of the file and (2) encrypt a hardcoded path and decrypt a list of files that it receives as an argument. Not bad for someone with limited technical skill.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chatgpt-is-enabling-s... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/