Your Guide to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new things, like stories, pictures, or music that normally require human intelligence. It does this by analyzing a huge amount of existing data (like books or images on the internet) and then mimicking and combining what it learned to create something original.

A large language model (LLM) is an AI system that uses deep learning to understand, generate, and process human language. LLMs power the generative AI tools we know today like ChatGPT. Think of them as the super brains behind a lot of the chat interfaces you see today. LLMs are trained on humongous amounts of data (like a lot of the internet) and often adhere to specific rules to protect user privacy and various laws. 

A deepfake is audio, video, or images that have been changed by AI. They are generally made using existing content (like a profile pic or YouTube video) but changed by swapping faces, cutting voices, altering images, and often make people say or do things they never did.   

AI browsers, not to be confused with AI search, are the platform that you use to access and browse the internet. These new browsers use AI to interact with you, providing customized suggestions and information versus a list of websites. AI search scans websites and provides a summary from multiple information sources. 

Cybercriminals are using AI for targeting and scale. They use AI to take all of the information about you already leaked (name, email, address and more from past data breaches) to craft individualized emails or text messages, at volume. They’re also using it to create deepfakes or voice scams. Malwarebytes research found one in five mobile users have been the target of a deepfake scam and nearly as many have encountered a virtual kidnapping scam (a decades-old tactic that now often uses AI voice cloning).  

Malwarebytes is using AI across the business to drive scale, boost productivity, enhance protections, and demystify cybersecurity for users, but we do this carefully with humans in the loop every step of the way.

We’ve been using AI for years to supercharge and refine our detections creating unmatched protection from both known and unknown threats. We also lead in identifying and blocking evasive malware because of our AI-powered engines.  

We’re leveraging large language models (LLMs) and the general knowledge of the internet to mine for new malware traits and techniques, fueling even better real-time protection across our products.  

We’re keeping our eye on tomorrow and continue to innovate to stay ahead of cybercriminals using AI in new and inventive ways. 

AI can provide scale, supporting important work in cybersecurity. However, we think it is very important that humans are still in the loop every step of the way to make sure AI isn’t being taken advantage of by cybercriminals.