AI in Dental Care: A Double-Edged Sword

Written by Justin N. Joy, Esq. | Nov 1, 2024 12:45:00 PM

Hacking incidents dominated the HIPAA Journal's most recent healthcare breach report. In 2023 alone, a total of 725 reported data breaches led to over 133 million compromised records. With over a 156% increase in records impacted from 2022, all eyes are on the next frontier of technology for a solution: artificial intelligence. The question is — will this advancement lead to stronger protection or a means for hackers to develop new attack methods?

AI can be a friend to dental practices, aiding in early detection, treatment planning, and patient management. However, it can also be a dangerous foe. Cybercriminals are aggressively seeking new and innovative ways to exploit all types of companies, especially the healthcare sector — and now they have help from AI.

The potential damage caused from AI-powered cyberattacks is significant, from deploying ransomware to stealing sensitive data through phishing techniques. However, it's important to note that as AI's capabilities give hackers access to increased levels of automation for creating and launching attacks, security firms are also finding success in adopting AI technologies for their own cyber threat prevention measures against these malicious activities.

Healthcare organizations, dental groups, DSOs, and others must be aware of these threats and take proactive steps to secure data systems adequately through rigorous protection via internal IT vigilance and external cybersecurity defense.

Our 4-part blog series will explore how hackers use AI to infiltrate your vulnerabilities and how cybersecurity teams use AI to combat these attacks on your business.

Part 2 AI in Dental Care: AI Phishing’s Direct Path to Your Data
Part 3 AI in Dental Care: How AI Cybersecurity Combats Emerging Threats
Part 4 AI in Dental Care: Your Battle Plan Against AI Hacking

How Hackers Use AI for Data Exfiltration

Hackers have been exploring machine learning techniques to enhance attacks and breach data, but not many know just how cyber threats have intensified in recent years:

Hackers now take advantage of AI's ability to quickly identify vulnerabilities, sorting through options for backdoors and gaps in online infrastructure.
AI chatbots craft detailed emails and messages that are almost impossible to detect as fraud.
Self-learning models can quickly adapt to cybersecurity measures, bypassing firewalls once considered well-fortified.

By combining these new avenues of infiltration, hackers made 2023 the worst year for breached healthcare records ever recorded. Today, the speed at which cybercriminals enter systems that were just recently considered to be highly secure is alarming. With a new toolkit centered around AI-powered cyberattacks, exploiting network vulnerabilities has never been easier. Let’s examine the upgraded tactics used to gain the ultimate prize—your data.

Automated Attacks

Hackers use automation capabilities at various stages of an AI-powered cyberattack. This includes scanning for vulnerabilities, launching phishing campaigns, or brute-forcing passwords. AI accelerates the data exfiltration process and dramatically increases the scale of incidents. Today, most attacks leverage AI in each stage of their plot:

Reconnaissance: AI assists hackers in gathering information about potential targets. Analyzing publicly available data allows algorithms to identify vulnerabilities and weak points in a target's digital presence.
Targeted Phishing: AI helps create more convincing and personalized emails and text communications by analyzing a target's online presence, social media posts, or past behaviors. AI generates phishing messages that are more likely to deceive recipients. See part 2 for more details.
Password Cracking: AI-powered cyberattacks make decryption effortless by learning patterns in breached password databases. Hackers use AI algorithms to generate likely passwords based on common patterns and human behavior.

Evasion and Obfuscation via Malware

Hackers have adopted AI to design purpose-built malware to avoid detection from security software. AI-powered malware refers to malicious software incorporating newly discovered methods to improve its functionality, evasiveness, and effectiveness in carrying out cyberattacks.

This type of AI allows this malware to adapt, learn, and optimize its behavior based on various factors, making it more challenging for traditional security measures to detect and defend against. Malware employs a combination of these abilities to craft unique and now ever-changing tactics to tear through outdated cyber threat prevention measures:

Adaptive Behavior: Shifts tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) based on the target environment to remain effective even as defenses change.
Evasion Techniques: Modifies its code, behavior, or attack patterns in real-time to evade standard detection.
Automated Targeting and Exploitation: Autonomously assesses vulnerabilities, identifies potential targets, and determines the most effective method for exploitation to deliver more targeted attacks.
Data Collection and Analysis: Gathers information from infected systems or networks, helping attackers gain insights into the target's infrastructure, behavior, or sensitive information.
Zero-Day Exploitation: Discovers and targets previously unknown gaps in security, also known as zero-day vulnerabilities, by automating the processes of finding opportunities and proliferating through a network.
Dynamic Attacks: Evolves based on the target environment and defenses, making it more difficult for those without cybersecurity experience to detect and respond effectively.

The Ultimate Intended Outcome? Widespread Digital Theft.

Hackers use AI algorithms to identify valuable data in compromised systems. They then compress and transmit it quickly and stealthily, making detection more challenging. Rapid detection is critical once a dental practice is breached. Hackers know this and have become experts at their covert activities, which slows you down. They don’t care that malicious actions will cost you loss of production, hefty compliance liability, or even class-action lawsuits.

Hiring cyber threat prevention experts better prepares dental practices and DSOs for the potential of a cyberattack, and keeping staff trained to spot attempts to gain unauthorized access to the network infrastructure and patient data is paramount.

While new methods of data exfiltration have grown quite sophisticated through artificial intelligence, social engineering and manipulation techniques have become more convincing than ever. As chatbots sound more human with each passing day, how can staff identify and stop threat actors before they cause damage? Read our next blog on how AI has increased the susceptibility to phishing tactics and the vigilance required in the digital workflows of dental practices.

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