As a natural language processing system, ChatGPT is responsible for protecting the sensitive information of its users against various security threats. However, like any other technology, ChatGPT faces some security challenges, some of which we will discuss in this article.

A chatbot with a unique feature

The unique features of ChatGPT allow this intelligent platform to provide human-like answers thanks to the large amount of data trained by them, which is one of the main reasons for the popularity of this chatbot among ordinary users and even employees of large IT companies. Another key feature of this bot is its ability to record the user's previous messages in a conversation and use them to more accurately shape subsequent responses during the conversation. To date, no artificial intelligence program has been able to achieve the popularity of ChatGPT. Altman, CEO of OpenAI, tweeted on December 5 that the chatbot had 1 million registered users just five days after its release, with 100 million monthly active users at the start of the new year.

Microsoft's big investment in OpenAI

In late January, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar contract and investment in OpenAI. However, Semafor news site announced in a report that the Redmonds are negotiating to invest ten billion dollars in this organization. In this regard, in a press event, Microsoft announced new updates to the Bing search engine and the Edge browser based on ChatGPT. Altman also confirmed that Microsoft has brought some technology from the ChatGPT model to the Bing browser. This is due to the fact that Google unveiled its artificial intelligence platform Bard (Bard AI) in response to this major development and announced that it will introduce Bard to the Google search engine in the coming weeks. Some technology experts believe that ChatGPT is a significant threat to the future of Google, because users will follow their questions and answers from the chatbot of GPT instead of going to Google's search tool. 

 Deficiencies and limitations

ChatGPT comes with limitations. In some cases, this artificial intelligence tool gives incorrect or superficial answers. For example, it can invent fictitious names and history books that don't exist, or it can't solve some math problems. Will Williams, vice president of machine learning at the startup Speechmatics, said the same thing: "The open aspects of AI tools are like a double-edged sword, because on the one hand, they have a high level of flexibility and eloquence in conversations, meaning that an engaging conversation is almost "Anything is possible with these chatbots, and on the other hand, you never know when the model will give real answers." The limitation of ChatGPT's knowledge to the data of 2021 is the second disadvantage of this chatbot. According to many experts in the field of technology, artificial intelligence is still not able to achieve general intelligence. General AI is a technology that all major companies are pursuing. This technology mostly refers to the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual and practical task that a human can do. However, experts and specialists in various fields warn that one should not rely too much on machine learning-based tools, because these tools are not designed to be as intelligent as humans. Machine learning tools work on the basis of a large amount of big data and by analyzing and finding patterns, they find the most probable answer to a problem, but the most probable answer does not always mean the most correct one.

What security challenges does ChatGPT face?

News of this chatbot's advancements has alarmed the cybersecurity world, with many experts warning that some security technologies will become ineffective in the future. The cyber security experts of CyberArk have announced that this chatbot has the ability to create malware. The company's researchers have been able to use this tool to create different codes and have found that it is difficult for anti-malware software to identify and deal with the code generated by this platform. The researchers of this company provided some code to this tool and asked it to write and encrypt a new file. ChatGPT did it without a problem.

In January 2023, McAfee experts published a report that some users of cybercrime forums were using this chatbot to create malware. They claimed that the malicious code written in Python was created by ChatGPT, which included Office package files, PDFs, etc., that were copied to a random folder, compressed, and uploaded to an FTP server. In addition to writing malicious codes, security experts are concerned about the use of ChatGPT in the field of generating phishing content and social engineering attacks aimed at stealing sensitive information. This bot simplifies the process of impersonating an organization or individual for cybercriminals. In February 2023, researchers from the security company WithSecure conducted an experiment in this field. They used ChatGPT to generate phishing emails in both text and audio modes and were able to trick a member of the financial team of a financial company into transferring money to a user account through social engineering.

All the findings show that ChatGPT's ability to create persuasive phishing emails is very high. So that by modeling the existing examples, ChatGPT can create detailed and customized emails that are difficult to distinguish from a real email. One of the other concerns related to ChatGPT is providing answers that appear to be valid and correct, but are completely wrong. Deep fake technology, which simulates people's video and voice, is the next concern in this field. Simulating a person's words and voice through chatbots will make it difficult for experts to identify fake samples from real ones.

Other important security challenges associated with ChatGPT

As we mentioned, ChatGPT as a natural language processing system is responsible for protecting the sensitive information of its users against various security threats. However, like any other technology, ChatGPT faces some security challenges, the most important of which are the following:

Privacy protection: ChatGPT has the ability to collect and analyze sensitive information by accessing users' data and analyzing them. Therefore, maintaining the privacy of users from the beginning of the conversation to its end is one of the important security challenges.

Designing Malware and Malicious Codes: As mentioned, hackers can use chatgpt in certain ways to write malicious codes or implement cyber attacks. For example, by injecting malicious code into a chatroom or social messaging, hackers can steal sensitive information within the user's environment.

Fake messages: ChatGPT makes extensive use of natural language processing and is therefore capable of generating fake and untrue text that may disrupt an organization's business activities and affect network performance.

Penetration into systems: Another big security challenge of ChatGPT is the risk of penetration and destruction of organizational networks and systems using security weaknesses.

The mentioned cases are only part of the challenges that ChatGPT is facing. In general, companies active in the field of security and defense products should use natural language processing systems based on artificial intelligence to improve security mechanisms and prevent unauthorized access to organizational resources and protect sensitive user data.

How can hackers use chatgpt?

ChatGPT enables the exchange of messages between users and intelligent algorithms. Hackers can use ChatGPT as a tool to achieve their goals. Generally, ChatGPT faces the following risks from hackers:

Access to sensitive information: Hackers can write malicious codes and inject them into popular online conferencing sites or programs using the ChatGPT platform to collect all the messages exchanged between people and use sensitive information to implement various attacks.

Identification of security weaknesses: Hackers may use ChatGPT to identify security weaknesses in systems to find a breach in security mechanisms. In the situation that ChatGPT does not allow to do such a thing, but hackers are able to do such a thing in indirect ways.

All in all, ChatGPT can give hackers a new opportunity to attack systems and gain access to sensitive information in the form of chat texts. For this reason, security managers must use appropriate security solutions to prevent possible attacks to ensure that user information is completely secure.

How can security experts use ChatGPT to improve security mechanisms?

Up to this part of the article, we examined the disadvantages and risks of ChatGPT for the security industry, but this intelligent platform is able to provide significant assistance to security experts, the most important of which are the following:

Detection of malicious messages: ChatGPT can use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect malicious messages. This system can identify messages that contain words that are commonly associated with the activities of hackers and cybercriminals and prevent them from being displayed to users.

Encryption of messages: ChatGPT can use strong encryption algorithms to encrypt users' messages. This feature allows users to maintain the validity of their message and ensure that any unauthorized person has access to their message.

Identify security threats: Security experts can use ChatGPT to identify security threats in the infrastructure. With this, possible attacks can be prevented and appropriate measures can be taken for this purpose.

In general, security experts can use ChatGPT to increase the security level of online platforms and social networks, provided that the above model is integrated with the key components of the platform and strong encryption algorithms are used to protect user information.

Defense solution of cyber security industry against ChatGPT

Considering that phishing attacks may be designed by this chatbot in the future, cyber professionals should identify phishing examples created by this bot and educate users. This tutorial can include custom examples created by ChatGPT itself and sample emails that this chatbot creates. In general, before the situation gets out of control, organizations should consider the necessary measures to deal with smart tools and cyber security experts should also receive the necessary training in this field.

last words:

At first glance, ChatGPT seems like a tool that can be useful for a variety of work processes, but before you ask ChatGPT to summarize important notes or evaluate your work for errors, it's a good idea to keep this in mind. Note that anything you share with ChatGPT may be used to educate the platform and may even appear in its responses to other users. This is something that some Samsung employees were unaware of before sharing their confidential information with this AI tool. A report by Korea Economic website shows that shortly after Samsung's semiconductor unit allowed its engineers to use ChatGPT, employees shared confidential information with the tool on at least three occasions. One employee had asked ChatGPT to review the source code of the company's sensitive database for errors, another employee had requested code optimization, and a third had sent ChatGPT a recorded session, asking the tool to detail the Extract the session.

After learning about this issue, Samsung restricted the use of ChatGPT by its employees. The company is investigating the above three employees in this field and has announced that it plans to build its own chatbot to prevent similar security errors from occurring.

In an article, the Engget website warned users that the ChatGPT policy states that the OpenAI organization uses user data to train its models, unless users explicitly object. Also, OpenAI asks users not to share their confidential information in conversations with ChatGPT, as it is unable to remove certain requests from your history. The only way to delete personally identifiable information on ChatGPT is to delete your account, which may take up to four weeks.