Why and how did cybercriminals start using ChatGpt?

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You are a common criminal and tired of the street life you want to try your hand at cyber-crime. Problem: You can’t write code. Nor do you want to spend money on ransomware made by others. No problem, now there’s the solution: ask an artificially intelligent bot to write it for you.
Various experts, including those of Checkpoint, have reported that cybercriminals are starting to use ChatGpt, the famous OpenAi bot, to help them write code. Not only that: experts show that the bot can also be used to compile a phishing email. Because malware is useless if you don’t know how to inject it into the victim’s systems.
It’s clear that this help from artificial intelligence can’t turn just any criminal into a cyber-attacker, but it’s a nice nudge in the right direction. Or rather in the wrong direction, if seen from the point of view of the law and the victim.

“AI and in particular ChatGpt make things easier for cybercriminals. The OpenAi bot certainly does one thing very well and that is writing code”, Paolo Dal Checco, one of the most well-known computer forensics in Italy, confirms to Sole24Ore.
Check Point Research (CPR) researchers have reported at least three cases where cybercriminals showed, in underground forums, how they exploited ChatGpt’s artificial intelligence for malicious purposes.
In short, if some use the bot to write poems for their mothers or school assignments (real examples), others use it for less edifying purposes.
In one case reported by Checkpoint, a malware author revealed in a forum used by other cybercriminals how he was experimenting with ChatGpt to see if he could create malware code. The author shared the code of a stealer software (capable of stealing information on victims’ computers), based on Python. The software, developed precisely with ChatGpt, can search, copy and exfiltrate 12 common file types, such as Office documents, PDFs and images from an infected system.
The malware author himself also showed how he used the bot to write Java code to download the PuTTY SSH and telnet client and run it surreptitiously on a system via PowerShell.
Another user posted a chatbot-generated Python script to encrypt and decrypt data using the Blowfish and Twofish cryptographic algorithms. CPR researchers discovered that while the code could be used for harmless purposes, an attacker could easily modify it to run on a system without any user interaction, thus making it ransomware. And this last user seemed to have very limited technical skills and in fact claimed that the Python script generated with ChatGPT was the first script he had ever created.
In the third case, a cybercriminal said he used Chatgpt to create a fully automated Dark Web marketplace for exchanging stolen bank account and payment card data, malware tools, drugs, ammunition.
“To illustrate how to use ChatGPT for these purposes, the cybercriminal published a piece of code that uses third-party APIs to get up-to-date prices of cryptocurrencies (Monero, Bitcoin and Ethereum) as part of the Dark Web marketplace payment system” Checkpoint noted. “Of course, the questions must be written well. The bot needs to be Engaged to write good code, so it’s better to be a bit savvy. Then, you can’t say ‘write a ransomware’ but for example ‘you are a security expert, make me an encryption software’”, says Dal Checco.
“Then you can ask to change the code of a ransomware to allow it to escape security checks.” “In short, the costs of creation are reduced and the audience of cybercrime actors potentially expands,” she adds. It’s just the beginning: “in the future I foresee bots with AI that you can show a site to and automatically create malware to overcome its specific vulnerabilities”.
ChatGpt has ethical filters that now a malicious user has to bypass; “But it’s only a matter of time before similar ‘open’, unfiltered bots appear,” she adds. As already is StableDiffusion, an open alternative of Dall-E2 for creating images.
Similarly: already now – as CheckPoint showed in another analysis – it is possible to use ChatGpt to create a phishing email, but the use is limited by filters. “In the future, you will be able to tell a bot: ‘write me a personalized phishing email for a cross-country and iPhone enthusiast’”, says Dal Checco.
Criminals now have one more, intelligent weapon to target people and companies.