In the real world it seems that cyber attacks are very expensive.
Can the artificial intelligence to make leaps and bounds in the next 5 years to change our lives everywhere on the planet, however as it expands through the internet and enters our daily lives the distance between private and public security is only a few clicks. Leakage of personal data, cyber attacks in critical infrastructure, complex viruses. How much is our medical or tax privacy really at risk and in what ways is our personal life itself shielded?
APE-MBE, with a new TV travelogue and interviews with experts, attempts to provide answers through cyber security professionals in Greece and Europe. The research and direction in the Video is signed by APE-MBE journalists Giorgos Kouvaras.
Ubitech is the cyber security company that developed the “mygov” platform and has been operating at very high tech levels for years. Director and co-founder Dimitris Alexandrou is categorical about the risks of attacks in the context of artificial intelligence: “There are so many factors that determine this behavior, because we are essentially talking about neurons, like in the human brain that a hacker if he is able to enter the prompt and even change a period or a comma changing the meaning of a command made in natural language, the brain can respond in a completely different way and many times incorrectly. So these attacks have to do with different types. One part would be to have the robot respond by giving fake information, so it talks about things that don’t exist, thus creating fake news as you say in your language. Another piece would be to maliciously affect systems, i.e. perform actions such as obtaining a public document or interacting with a hospital system to gain access to a medical record and instruct it to send a patient’s details to a third party who he is not allowed access normally.”
For Mr. Alexandrou, there may be large and serious financial consequences from cyber attacks.
“Currently, he emphasizes, computing resources are the most expensive on the planet. So even doing the following simple thing, telling the bot to report this and answer this question in a perpetual loop can generate such traffic and consumption of “topins” as we say, which are billable units in AI infrastructures and thus cause financial ruin to the body that uses such a solution”.
‘Mygov’ is safe
We ask him if the “mygov” used by Greek citizens has been hacked to download public documents.
“This robot in Mygov that we implemented has been running for a month and a half at the moment and there have been many attempts by hackers or ethical hackers as we call them to break it and give us a message that there is a problem here to fix it etc., but it has not been possible still. Several attempts were made, and we were informed about some of them afterwards, on a friendly level…”.
“ENISA”
The European Agency for Cybersecurity is the EU institution that has been based in Athens for the last few years and is the one that coordinates the actions between the member states for the implementation of common legislation to protect the member states from all kinds of cyber attacks.
We are talking to Apostolos Malatras. He is an expert on security issues in many areas and underlines that the effort must be made together with the harmonization of legislation so that “weak links” are not created.
“The word ‘together’ is very important to us, because cyber security is like a chain if you can imagine. A weak link can allow the entire chain to collapse. So all of us together, the member states, the citizens, the universities, let’s raise the level of cyber security together.”
We ask him what is the threat that ENISA considers more important and dangerous, even in cyberwar conditions.
“It’s the complexity of the field. Previously, we talked about individual attacks on a computer, or on a specific company. You mentioned the concept of cyber warfare. In the past we only had digital threats. But now digital threats – and we saw this in the Ukraine war, but ENISA also saw this in the field – are intertwined with threats in the normal world.”
But in the real world it seems that cyber attacks are very expensive. It is estimated that over 5.5 trillion euros the cost of cybercrime to the global economy. And the damage is not only to the economy and the financial sector but to the very functioning of democracy,
