As Bloomberg reports, Cisco sounded the alarm that tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT will force companies to take up new defenses as phishing attacks grow more convincing.

Jeetu Patel, head of Cisco’s security and collaboration divisions, told the news service in a briefing at the conference that AI software can customize phishing emails, making it harder for humans to notice that the messages are phony. According to Patel, Cisco’s access to internet traffic data should help it detect anomalies and protect users.

Some tech companies are banking on “good AI” to defeat the bad actors. Also at the RSA Conference 2023, as TechCrunch reports, Google unveiled Cloud Security AI Workbench, a cybersecurity offering powered by generative AI. Cloud Security AI Workbench will rely on Sec-PaLM, security-oriented AI language model. An offshoot of Google’s PaLM model, Sec-PaLM is “fine-tuned for security use cases,” Google says, incorporating security intelligence such as research on software vulnerabilities, malware, threat indicators and behavioral threat actor profiles.

“While generative AI has recently captured the imagination, Sec-PaLM is based on years of foundational AI research by Google and DeepMind, and the deep expertise of our security teams,” Google wrote in a blog post. “We have only just begun to realize the power of applying generative AI to security, and we look forward to continuing to leverage this expertise for our customers and drive advancements across the security community.”

What’s more, as CRN reports, SentinelOne introduced “Purple AI,” a new generative AI-based threat hunting tool that users can query using natural language. Ric Smith, SentinelOne’s chief product and technology officer, said the tool will save analysts huge amounts of time and help them be more productive.

As SC Magazine reports, RSA Security CEO Rohit Ghai addressed the promise and the perils of AI in his opening remarks. “Every new technology wave is bigger, faster and more disruptive than all previous ones,” Ghai is quoted as saying. “This time is no different.”