Police in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou have dismantled a criminal gang that used artificial intelligence service ChatGPT to carry out cyberattacks on companies and extort money.
On November 20, city officials received a complaint from the company alleging that the servers were victims of ransomware attacks, which prevent users from accessing systems or files and demand a ransom to restore them, the official Global Times newspaper reported.
Social networks claimed that the attackers demanded $20,000 in Tether cryptocurrency.
Local police examined the affected servers, extracted Trojan software for analysis and assessed the addresses of cryptocurrency wallets used for extortion, managing to identify two suspects.
On November 30, authorities arrested two suspects in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
The next day, two more accomplices were detained in Beijing. The suspects admitted to being involved in developing ransomware and optimizing programs in which they used ChatGPT for “vulnerability analysis,” “permission infiltration,” and extortion, authorities said.
In July, the Asian country approved a temporary regulation for generative artificial intelligence services like ChatGPT, which will be subject to “existing rules on information security, personal data protection, intellectual property and scientific and technological progress.”
Several Chinese tech giants such as Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba have introduced artificial intelligence-based services in recent months, although questions have been raised about the application of this type of technology in China due to heavy censorship by authorities.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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