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How to prevent chatbot attacks?

Date:

Chaitanya Hiremath

Chatbots or intelligent VAs have quickly become a standard among businesses. These automated virtual assistants help manage critical data, elevate customer experience, provide personalized recommendations and the list goes on. But in the face of this rapid automation, are we sure that our data is in safe hands?

First of all, let us see what exactly a VA is.

To put it simply, a chatbot or an intelligent VA is a software program that emulates human conversation. This interaction can happen either by voice or written message. These bots make use of natural language processing or NLP to interact with customers as a real person would.

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Chatbot’s Booming Market

A growing number of companies are using VAs, particularly chatbots, to fuel the caliber of their customer experience.

From healthcare to banking to customer service, every sector is employing chatbots to upscale their user experience and deliver real-time assistance. In fact, 80 percent of companies are anticipated to be using VA chatbots by the end of 2020.

Following the rise of VAs, chatbot attacks have become commonplace

The blend of reduced customer support costs, continuous connectivity, and instant acknowledgment make chatbots a cut above the rest. However, before incorporating a VA into your business, it is important to be aware of its security implications. While it isn’t commonly known, it is necessary to put a reliable, detailed, and multi-layer security solution in place to make the chatbots secure.

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The need for protecting VAs can be easily demonstrated with the help of Delta’s 2017 data breach case. Delta Airlines sued its artificial intelligence vendor because of its weak security protocols. The virtual assistant providing company failed to install multi-factor authentication, which led to the hacker’s ability to modify the chatbot’s source code and expose credit card information of hundreds of thousands of customers. The hackers were able to see Delta’s website activity and divert patrons to a fraudulent website where they could successfully secure user data. In today’s data-driven world, failing to secure your customer’s data can be a colossal oversight. This is why chatbot systems must have a layer of monitoring and protection to prevent confidential data from getting into the wrong hands.

This case shed some much-needed light on what could happen when a VA chatbot is compromised, and therefore more research has been made available on the different forms of chatbot attacks. For the most part, chatbot attacks can be categorized into two forms- first being the internal or manipulation attacks that modify the system behavior and second is the external or extraction attacks that discreetly detect hidden information and attack system weaknesses.

Why is chatbot security needed?

The rising propensity of businesses employing VAs has also fostered the growth of cyber-attacks on these automated systems. Let’s look at the bigger picture here, the whole purpose of employing chatbots is to provide a streamlined and personalized customer service that is available 24×7. But using unprotected chatbots will ante up the contingency of data theft and invasion of privacy. What’s more, it can even result in consumer class action lawsuits that can put companies back millions of dollars and sacrifice the integrity of their customer and company data.

Earlier chatbots were mainly used for providing generic information like address or branch information which is available publicly but the world has quickly moved towards automation and cost savings. Besides, humans were prone to err while rendering accurate information. These days chatbots are used for supporting or replacing many critical human tasks. What it means from a security point of view is that the chatbot now has access to sensitive and private information. Machine learning has grown at full tilt without keeping security as a critical part of it. Presently there are a large number of chatbots deployed worldwide with such high degrees of access to sensitive information that security for these systems is becoming an exigent element.

Now, let’s delve into the production side of things. The marketplace is jam-packed with players advancing towards delivering more dynamic and easy to manage chatbots, however, there is a noticeable lack of vendors providing solutions for safeguarding chatbots from various security risks. To that end, companies are overlooking a fundamental aspect that carries significant implications.

Want to prevent chatbot attacks on your website?

VAs like any other piece of software are vulnerable to security threats, but in the case of chatbots, these attacks are very difficult to defend against mainly due to the inherent make-up of the machine learning systems. Chatbots are considered to be human-like objects but in reality they are not. Their intelligence comes from the dataset, model, and its hyper-parameters, plus they learn from the context around them. These core components of machine learning systems are not easy to secure as they are sourced from public repositories and hence this data is readily discoverable and possibly within reach of a hacker. It takes an organization with extensive knowledge of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and data science to create a product that can provide protection to these chatbots.

We at Scanta know that a simple web app or network firewalls are not enough to protect your VA chatbot. And this is why we developed VA Shield™, our flagship product. VA Shield is a chatbot security solution that analyzes requests, responses, and conversations to and from the system to provide an enhanced layer of monitoring. Not only that, but VA Shield also tracks analytics to provide deeper business insight on the use of Virtual Assistant Chatbot.

Securing chatbots or ML systems is a complicated problem and building such a solution needs a thorough understanding of the system. Machine learning systems were not built keeping security as one of the components in the inception stage and they are deeply ingrained in various mission-critical systems already. Not only that, NLP based interface brings additional complexities to security problems because of the free form of the NLP interface, and considering NLP is still an evolving domain, no one has mastered the area yet.

Our deep-rooted understanding of machine learning and artificial intelligence laid the groundwork for the invention of VA Shield. This chatbot security solution adds a critical Zero Trust security framework to your Virtual Assistant Chatbot system that keeps it running smoothly and securely without meddling with the existing security enterprise.

Concluding Remarks

This article has hardly scraped the surface of what could happen if your company is using an unprotected VA, the ramifications of which are far-reaching. That is why Scanta aims to ensure that your Virtual Assistant Chatbot is protected with a new level of security empowered to stop machine learning attacks.

Source: https://chatbotslife.com/how-to-prevent-chatbot-attacks-12531596f07f?source=rss—-a49517e4c30b—4

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