More than half of Irish businesses expect Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to lead to catastrophic cyber attacks in the next 12 months, according to a new survey.
The PwC 2024 Irish Digital Trust Insights Survey shows that 58% of Irish respondents are planning to use GenAI tools for cyber defence and 69% say they will increase their organisation's 2024 cyber budget.
Less than half of Irish businesses said that they understand the cyber risks posed by emerging technologies.
The survey of nearly 4,000 business and tech leaders across 71 countries, including Ireland, focused on how the technology and security landscape is evolving and found that Irish companies are most concerned about cyber threats such as third-party breaches, ransomware, and business email compromise.
The research found that the proportion of businesses around the world that have experienced a data breach of more than €1M has increased by a third in 2023 compared to 2022 - from 27% to 36%.
"The survey shows that cybersecurity continues to be top of mind for Irish business leaders, and now more than ever," said Leonard McAuliffe, Partner, PwC Ireland Cyber Practice.
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"Business leaders need to be agile and adapt to the changing market."
"With emerging tech developments such as Artificial Intelligence hitting the market in transformative ways, executives must challenge the status quo by building security into the fabric of their organisations instead of reacting once there is a crisis," Mr McAuliffe said.
Speaking on Morning Ireland, Leonard McAuliffe pointed out that, not only were malware attacks becoming more sophisticated and destructive, but there were also clean-up costs as a consequence of cyber attacks.
"There are extra costs around setting up call centres to notify people who's data has been affected and dealing with queries around the attack," he said.
"The restoration and recovery is resulting in a lot of the costs."
He explained that the top three forms of attack now were ransomware, misconfiguration of cloud security and third party breaches, where hackers exploit a weakness in a supplier or an analytics company providing services to the firm.
The danger presented by AI, he added, came from the ability of generative AI programmes, such as ChatGPT, to write malware.
"It's like putting a loaded gun in the hands of the masses. Now anyone can create their own malware," Mr McAuliffe explained.
More skilled hackers and nation-state sponsored hacking groups can generate malware that can think for itself.
"Think of a virus that could mutate or a new strain. This malware will be able to adapt and think for itself. Imagine that spreading globally across the internet. That's why people are worried," he concluded.
