Generative AI is reshaping the cyber threat landscape according to new Lloyd’s report

Lloyd’s, the world’s leading marketplace for insurance and reinsurance has today published a new report on how the rapid evolution of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology will impact the cyber risk landscape, requiring businesses to build greater resilience to these evolving threats.

The report - Generative AI: Transforming the cyber landscape – focuses on cyber as one of the most complex and critical risks threatening national security and businesses today, with the dynamics of the risk landscape already posing many challenges.

The emergence of AI, particularly unrestricted advanced GenAI models, is set to reshape the cyber landscape as it augments both threat actor and defensive capabilities.

Cyber insurance has a key role to play in helping businesses and broader society understand and manage this ever-evolving threat. It is important that businesses and the insurance industry take proactive steps to manage the potential changes to the threat landscape.

Despite the advanced capabilities of GenAI technologies and applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) to cybercrime, material impacts on the cyber threat landscape have so far been minimal. This is due to the industry’s safety mechanisms and effectiveness of AI model governance and cost and hardware barriers which have prevented widespread misuse by threat actors.

However, as they become more accessible they pose an increasing risk, creating potential opportunities for threat actors to use the tools in malicious ways, leading to harm or damage for people, property, and tangible and intangible assets.

The impact of GenAI on the cyber landscape is likely to increase the frequency, severity, and diversity of smaller scale cyber attacks, which will grow over the next 12-24 months, followed by a plateauing as security and defensive technologies catch up to counterbalance their impacts.