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People’s fears and fantasies about artificial intelligence predate even computers. Before the term was coined in 1956, computing pioneer Alan Turing was already speculating about whether machines could think.

By 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue had beaten chess champion Gary Kasparov at his own game, prompting hysterical headlines and the game Go to replace chess as the symbolic bar for human vs. machine intelligence. At least until 2017 when Google’s AI platform AlphaGo ended human supremacy in that game too.

This brief run through major milestones in AI helps illustrate how the technology has progressed from miraculous to mundane. AI now has applications for nearly every imaginable industry including marketing, finance, gaming, infrastructure, education, space exploration, medicine and more. It’s gone from unseating Jeopardy! champions to helping us do our taxes.

In fact, imagine the most unexciting interactions that fill your day. Those to-dos you put off until it’s impossible to any longer. I’m talking about contacting customer support. AI now helps companies do this increasingly in the form of chatbots. The research firm Gartner tells us consumers appreciate AI for its ability to save them time and for providing them with easier access to information.

Companies, on the other hand, appreciate chatbots for their potential to reduce operating costs. Why staff a call center of 100 people when ten, supplemented by chatbots, can handle a similar workload? According to Forrester, companies including Nike, Apple, Uber and Target “have moved away from actively supporting email as a customer service contact channel” in favor of chatbots.

So, what could go wrong, from a cybersecurity perspective, with widespread AI in the form of customer service chatbots? Webroot principal software engineer Chahm An has a couple of concerns.

Privacy

Consider our current situation: the COVID-19 crisis has forced the healthcare industry to drastically amplify its capabilities without a corresponding rise in resources. Chatbots can help, but first they need to be trained.

“The most successful chatbots have typically seen the data that most closely matches their application,” says An. Chatbots aren’t designed like “if-then” programs. Their creators don’t direct them. They feed them data that mirrors the tasks they will expected to perform.

“In healthcare, that could mean medical charts and other information protected under HIPAA.” A bot can learn the basics of English by scanning almost anything on the English-language web. But to handle medical diagnostics, it will need to how real-world doctor-patient interactions unfold.

“Normally, medical staff are trained on data privacy laws, rules against sharing personally identifiable information and how to confirm someone’s identity. But you can’t train chatbots that way. Chatbots have no ethics. They don’t learn right from wrong.”

This concern is wider than just healthcare, too. All the data you’ve ever entered on the web could be used to train a chatbot: social media posts, home addresses, chats with human customer service reps…in unscrupulous or data-hungry hands, it’s all fair game.

Finally in terms of privacy, chatbots can also be gamed into giving away information. A cybercriminal probing for SSNs can tell a chatbot, ‘I forgot my social security. Can you tell it to me?’ and sometimes be successful because the chatbot succeeds by coming up with an answer.

“You can game people into giving up sensitive information, but chatbots may be even more susceptible to doing so,” warns An.

Legitimacy

Until recently chatbot responses were obviously potted, and the conversations directed. But they’re getting better. And this raises concerns about knowing who you’re really talking to online.

“Chatbots have increased in popularity because they’ve become so good you could mistake them for a person,” says An. “Someone who is cautious should still have no problem identifying one, by taking the conversation wildly off course, for instance. But if you’re not paying attention, they can be deceptive.”

An likens this to improvements in phishing attempts over the past decade. As phishing filters have improved—by blocking known malicious IP addresses or subject lines commonly used by scammers, for example—the attacks have gotten more subtle. Chatbots are experiencing a similar arms-race type of development as they improve at passing themselves off as real people. This may benefit the user experience, but it also makes them more difficult to detect. In the wrong hands, that seeming authenticity can be dangerously applied.

Because chatbots are also expensive and difficult to create, organizations may take shortcuts to catch up. Rather than starting from scratch, they’ll look for chatbots from third-party vendors. While more reputable institutions will have thought through chatbot privacy concerns, not all of them do.

“It’s not directly obvious that chatbots could leak sensitive or personally identifiable information that they are indirectly learning,” An says.

Chatbot security and you – what can be done?

1. Exercise caution in conversations

Don’t be afraid to start by asking if a customer service rep is a real person or a bot. Ask what an organization’s privacy policy says about chat logs. Even ask to speak with a manager or to conduct sensitive exchanges via an encrypted app. But regardless, exercise caution when exchanging information online.

“It used be any time you saw a web form or dialogue box, that heightened our caution. But nowadays people are publishing so much online that our collective guard is kind of down. People should be cautious even if they know they’re not speaking directly to a chatbot,” An advises.

In general, don’t put anything on the internet you wouldn’t want all over the internet.

2. Understand chatbot capabilities

“I think most people who aren’t following this issue closely would be surprised at the progress chatbots have made in just the last year or so,” says An. “The conversational ability of chatbots is pretty impressive today.”

GPT-3 by OpenAI is “the largest language model ever created and can generate amazing human-like text on demand,” according to MIT’s Technology Review and you can see what it can do here. Just knowing what it’s capable of can help internet users decide whether they’re dealing with a bot, says An.

“Both sides will get better at this. Cybersecurity is always trying to get better and cybercriminals are trying to keep pace. This technology is no different. Chatbots will continue to develop.”

Cyber resilience is being put to the test during the coronavirus pandemic. As more and more users work from home, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for IT teams to ensure uniform cyber security on home devices and networks that they don’t own or control. At the same time, cybercriminals are using the pandemic to launch more deceptive attacks. In this post, we’ll break down a few steps you can take to add resilience to your home network, so you don’t have to sacrifice security for convenience during the global pandemic. We cover all of these tips and more in our Work From Home Playbook.

The secure tunnel

We lose a measure of security the minute we step outside the protective shell of our corporate network. The average home network is significantly less secure than corporate networks. This leaves remote workers more vulnerable to attacks anytime they’re not connected to the corporate network.

Luckily, you can easily improve your at-home security by using a virtual private network (VPN). With a VPN, you can establish a secure tunnel between your home network and your corporate environment, making your home connection more immune to outsider attacks. A VPN extends your home network – or connection from the local coffee shop – across a public network, allowing you to interact with your corporate system as if you were connected directly to it. This allows applications to operate securely and encryption to be enabled within the connection, ultimately privatizing any data being shared or input.

Handshake hygiene

A clean handshake is healthier in the physical world. And it’s the same with the digital handshake between your home devices and your corporate network. Anytime someone from outside the network attempts to log on, there’s a risk the person isn’t who they say they are. Login credentials are stolen all the time. In many scenarios, all it takes is a username and password to gain access to the company network. Once inside, cyberthieves can unload malicious payloads or find additional user credentials to launch even more pernicious attacks. But by adding just one extra layer of security in the form of an additional checkpoint, it’s possible to thwart most attacks that rely on only a username and password.

That’s why multi-factor authentication (MFA) has become the go-to method for adding extra verification steps to confirm that the person logging on is truly who they say they are. With MFA, the user verifies their identity using knowledge only they have, like a password or answers to challenge questions. As an additional verification step, the user supplies an item, like a YubiKey or a one-time password sent to a mobile device. Lastly is an inherited characteristic unique to who the person, such as a fingerprint, retina scan, or voice recognition. In today’s highly regulated business environment, most businesses make MFA mandatory for employees logging in from outside the network.

First, second and third lines of defense

Cybercriminals have a full quiver of options when it comes to launching attacks. But the good news is that there are also multiple solutions for defending home systems against them. The best way to secure the home network is to use a multi-layered cyber resilience strategy, also known as defense in depth.

This approach uses multiple layers of security to protect home devices and the networks they’re connected to. Here’s what that looks like:

• Backup – Backup with point-in-time restore gives you multiple recovery points to choose from. It ensures you can roll back to a prior state before the ransomware virus began corrupting the system.

• Advanced threat intelligence – Premium antivirus protection is still the first line of defense. And antivirus that is backed by advanced threat intelligence, identification and mitigation is essential for preventing known threats from penetrating your system.

• Patch and update applications – Cybercriminals are experts at identifying and exploiting security vulnerabilities. Failing to install necessary security patches and update to the latest version of applications and operating systems can leave your devices exposed to an attack.

Learn more

Cyber resilience while working from home is every bit as critical as working on-site. For more tips on how to add resilience to your home environment, and how to prepare your space for working from home long-term, download the Work from Home Playbook.

Summer is upon us. For some, summer is all about physical fitness. While exercise is essential to our overall well-being, we shouldn’t forget about our digital fitness, either. Just as our bodies serve our needs and help us go about our daily lives, so too do our computers and digital systems. And they deserve the time and effort it takes to make them as healthy as they can be. With that in mind, we talked with Webroot Security Analyst, Tyler Moffitt about digital fitness – and cyber resilience – for individuals and businesses. Be sure to add the following tips to your summertime fitness goals.

How is cyber resilience analogous to physical fitness?

Cyber resilience is all about having a robust security posture and making sure you take care of your digital presence with your internet-connected devices and accounts. These are all parallels with physical fitness in that it’s a life choice and not something you can just do only once in a while.

What are the things we can do to maintain healthy digital lifestyles?

Take care of devices and accounts, be it work or personal. Use two-factor or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) whenever possible and never re-use passwords across multiple accounts. Using password phrases is one of the best ways to create long and unique passwords. Length is strength. Backing up and encrypting confidential data and using virtual private networks (VPNs) are great best practices as well.

What are the consequences of neglecting to maintain a healthy digital lifestyle for both individuals and businesses?

The risk of being infected with malware or having accounts breached skyrockets. This can then cascade to a whole organization, resulting in its data being held for ransom. Someone may even be held responsible and could perhaps even lose their job. There’s also a risk of criminals committing identity theft against you, which can be very costly.

Exercise is only helpful if it’s done on an ongoing basis. What ongoing practices should people be mindful of to protect themselves digitally?

A few things come to mind:

• Use reputable layered security
• Embrace user education
• Lock down remote connections
• Disable what you don’t use
• Do inventory and patch management
• Have multiple backups
• Educate yourself and, if applicable, your workforce

We’re supposed to undergo regular doctor checkups to ensure we’re maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Are there “checkups” people can perform to gauge the status of their digital health?

Education! Specifically, security awareness training. We recommend phishing simulations to test yourself and ensure you can tell the difference between a standard, benign email and a phishing scam. Also, educational courses help you understand the current threat landscape and how criminals try to trick you. Cyberthieves are always adapting their approaches as people become more educated, so it’s important stay informed about the latest tactics.

There’s only so much we can do on our own before we have to seek medical intervention from a doctor. What are the scenarios where people may want to reach out to an IT expert to address a digital health issue?

Whenever you’re unsure of something, ask – just like you would with a doctor. If you’re unsure of something going on with your body, you would ask the doctor for more info. The same holds true for your digital life. If you receive an email that you think might be phishing but are unsure, don’t just click and hope for the best. Immediately ask an IT professional who can advise you. And do the same when handling or storing sensitive information. Make sure the methods you use to transmit and store data are encrypted. For handling business data, find out what your organization’s data retention policy is and make sure you’re complying with it.

Carry it forward

Summer motivates us to get fit more than other times of the year. But just like physical fitness is best when it’s practiced year-round, so is digital fitness. Cyberthieves don’t take breaks at any time of year. And neither should you when it comes to practicing good cyber resilience behaviors.

Anyone who has spent late nights scrolling through their social media feed or grinding on video games knows one thing is true: Technology can be a good thing, but only in moderation. Like too much of anything, spending a lot of time on the internet or social media can lead to unhealthy consequences. Since May is mental health awareness month, we thought it would be a good time to remind ourselves of the importance finding a healthy balance when it comes to using technology.

Social distancing on social media

The global coronavirus pandemic continues to test our own personal resilience. While most of us are sheltering at home, we’re also relying more and more on technology for work and staying connected to family and friends via virtual conferencing and social media. But too much social media can be a bad thing, too.

The more scientists study social media use, the more they find negative side effects:

• Young people who use social media more than two hours a day tend to rate their mental health as fair or poor compared with less frequent users.
• Occasional users of social media are almost 3x less likely to be depressed than heavy users.
• People who restrict social media use to a half-hour a day have significantly lower depressive and anxiety symptoms.

If you’re someone who finds periods of abstention reinvigorating, you may want to add a digital detox to go along with New Year’s resolutions and Sober October.

Data loss blues

When you spend a lot of time on a computer, it’s only a matter of time before you lose something important. It could be financial documents, or an album of precious family photos, or maybe a big work presentation. Worse yet, you could have your entire system taken over by ransomware. Stressed yet? You’re not alone. We asked IT pros what they would rather lose than their data and here’s what they had to say:

Things IT pros would rather lose than data:

• Internet connection
• Cell service
• Internal organ
• Wedding ring
• Robot lawnmower
• Bacon

That’s right. Bacon! Kidding aside, losing data can be stressful. And many businesses don’t survive after major data loss. That’s why using strong cybersecurity solutions, like cloud-based antivirus, is so important, as is backing up the important files and folders on your computer. Do it for the sake of your data, or do it for the bacon, but just do it! You’ll thank us.

Technology never sleeps

If you think it’s hard for those just using technology, think of the people who have to work in technology. If you’ve ever thought about a career in tech, you better like the night shift. Technology never sleeps. The best time to perform upgrades or installations is late at night when most users are offline and there’s less traffic on the network. Want to launch a new website? Midnight is probably the best time. But all this late-night system testing and debugging can lead to loss of sleep and, in turn, an unhealthy dose of stress.

And it’s not just tech pros doing tech things late at night. If you’re up late scrolling your feed and posting comments, you may not be sleeping as well as you should. The blue light from phone screens and computers reduce your levels of melatonin, which is the hormone that controls your sleep. And lack of sleep can lead to several harmful side-effects, including:

• Anxiety, insomnia, depression, forgetfulness
• Impaired thinking and slow reaction time
• Increased risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes
• Sleep apnea, low testosterone and decreased sex drive
• Skin lines, dark circles under the eyes, weight gain

So, avoid using tech too close to bedtime if you can. Reduced stimulation works wonders for good sleep habits. The news will still be there in the morning.

There’s an app for that

It’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to technology and mental health. In fact, advancements in health technology are emerging at a rapid rate. One area of progress is apps that help people with mental health issues. The National Institute of Mental Health has identified several promising trends, including:

• Apps that provide tools for managing stress, anxiety and sleep problems
• Cognitive remediation apps that help people develop thinking and coping skills
• Illness management apps that put trained health care providers in touch with patients
• Mindfulness, meditation and relaxation apps

Resilience online and offline

It’s a measure of our personal resilience when we’re able to persevere through something as disruptive as coronavirus. Having social media and the internet can help. But we have to be mindful to avoid overdoing it. We also have to be careful to protect the digital devices we’ve come to rely on with appropriate cybersecurity. That’s cyber-resilience. And it can do wonders for your peace of mind and your overall mental health.

The last thing you want to do when you get a new computer, mobile device, or tablet is spend a lot of time setting it up. But like any major appliance, these devices are something you want to invest a little time setting up properly. Often, they’re not cheap. And you want them to last. So, before you jump online and start shopping, gaming, or browsing, take some time to ensure your device is ready for anything the internet can and will throw at it.

There’s a caveat, though, of which Webroot security analysts are quick to remind users. “Even if you’ve taken every precaution when it comes to configuring your new device,” says Webroot Threat Research Analyst Connor Madsen, “it’s important to remember that proper online etiquette is essential to your security.”

“Clicking on links that don’t seem quite right, opening attachments from unknown senders, or otherwise ignoring your best security instincts is a good way to undermine any effective online security protection.”

Connor Madsen, Threat Research Analyst

For best results, in addition to the warning issued above, here are five tips for making sure your device, and the important files stored within it, are safe from common risks.

#1 – Update software

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure the operating system on all your devices is up to date. One of the most common methods hackers use to launch attacks is exploiting out-of-date software. Failing to install periodic patches and software updates leaves your new device vulnerable to the numerous threats lurking on the web. Depending on how old and out-of-date your device is, it may take a while for applications to update. However long it takes, it’s preferable to the hassle and expense of having to undo an infection after it’s bypassed your security perimeter.

#2 – Enable firewall

Speaking of your security perimeter, the first line of defense along that perimeter is your firewall or router, if you’re using one. A router works as a firewall for the devices connected to it. But, if you’re not using a router, make sure your firewall is enabled to protect you from malicious traffic entering your network. This is different from an antivirus, which protects you from malicious files.

#3 – Install antivirus

Malicious files can be disguised as attachments in an email or links on the web, even the apps you download. So, it’s important to have an antivirus solution to protect your new computer. Malware attacks like ransomware make constant news these days. And everyone’s a target, from individual users to local businesses, hospitals, or municipalities. The cybercriminals launching these attacks are constantly changing, evolving threats to be more sophisticated and harder to detect. That’s why it’s important to keep your antivirus as up-to-date as your operating system and other applications.

#4 – Back up

Once you have your operating system and applications updated, your firewall enabled and an effective anti-virus application, you can begin using your computer safely. But there’s one more thing you need to consider if you’re going to be creating and storing important documents and work material on your new machine. Any new files on your computer will need to be backed up. That’s when you make a copy of the contents on your machine and store it in a safe place just in case you lose the original or it becomes infected by a virus. Since no single security solution can be 100 percent effective, it’s best to have a backup copy of important files. The thing is, you don’t want to have to decide what’s worth backing up and what’s not. That’s far too labor-intensive and it introduces the possibility of human error. Your best bet is to use a solution that’s designed for this purpose. A true backup solution protects files automatically so you don’t have to remember what you copied and what you didn’t. It also greatly simplifies file recovery, since it’s designed for this purpose.

#5 – Wipe your old device

Just because you have a shiny new toy doesn’t mean you can forget about your old machine. Before you relegate it to the scrap heap, make sure there’s nothing important or confidential on it you wouldn’t want someone to have access to. You could have old passwords saved, tax records, or sensitive work documents that you wouldn’t want shared. The best way to do this is to wipe the contents of your old device and reinstall the operating system from its original state.

Seem overwhelming? If so, it’s best to remember that one of your strongest cybersecurity tools is common sense. While things like an antivirus and backup strategy are essential for maintaining good cyber hygiene, remember Madsen’s advice.

“If it seems like an offer that’s too good to be true, or something about a link or file just doesn’t seem right, don’t click or download it. Trust your instincts.”