Natalie Coull: Cyber security in the AI era

The image of a hacker, surrounded by crumpled cans of energy drinks and furiously typing away as lines of 0’s and 1’s flash menacingly in front of them, is a common one in films and TV shows.

It is the defining image of hackers for many people, but it might not be that way for much longer, says Dr Natalie Coull, the head of the cybersecurity and computing department at Abertay University.

According to Coull, the future of hacking could be powered by artificial intelligence (AI), making it much more accessible to criminals around the world.

“I think AI has absolutely opened up the ability to carry out a cyberattack,” says Coull. “It has made it much more accessible to people. Previously it might have been something that you would need very, very specific technical skills for. Now you can just use AI systems to do it for you.”

By using AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok, cybercriminals could potentially use AI to write perfectly formed phishing emails, identify potential targets and increase their chances of success.

The statistics seem to track with this idea. Recent data published by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says the number of "highly significant" cyberattacks in the UK rose by almost 50 per cent since 2024. In 2024 just over half of businesses and around a third of charities reported some form of cybersecurity breach or attack to their systems. This number rose to 74 per cent for large businesses, at an average cost of £10,830 per attack.

“That's where I think AI has really increased the ability of some of those attacks to kind of get up to that next level in terms of looking much more authentic,” says Coull. “In the past some cyberattacks could be detected because they looked abnormal in a computer system, but it's now easier for cybercriminals to use AI to mimic what normal might look like and subvert some of the alarm bells that could be in place to spot attacks.”

As head of Abertay’s cyber security and computing department, Coull is responsible for the ethical hacking course at the university. On Abertay’s website, the tagline reads, “It takes a hacker to catch a hacker,” which is something Coull stands firmly behind.

“What we are up against are malicious hackers and criminals who have got so much time and effort to put in to try to find the smallest way possible that they can then get access and leverage into an organisation,” says Coull. “The ethical hacker mindset is all about taking a step back and looking at cybersecurity in terms of how somebody that's trying to break in would be able to use or abuse it in a way that wasn't intended to then get access and compromise the security of a system.”

Some of the most common attacks on large companies or public bodies are ransomware attacks, where malicious software is used to get inside a business’s computer system and steal data, locking it away until a ransom is paid.  

Despite the risks to cybersecurity posed by AI, the potential for the technology to act as an effective addition to cybersecurity protocols is high, says Coull.

“AI has been used within cybersecurity for some time now,” says Coull. “There are incident-response systems that use a pattern matching approach to analyse network traffic and build up an understanding of what normal looks like. They can then identify if particular individuals usually work during the hours of 9 to 5, but their account is being used at two o'clock on a Saturday morning, they can flag that and say ‘This doesn't look normal, there's something weird going on here.’”

By using AI to combat cybercriminals, some of the impact of cyberattacks could be mitigated, says Coull. But as with any threat, the onus is on companies and governments to continually evolve their cybersecurity protocols to combat emerging threats like AI and eventually quantum computing.

“I would like to think that as a nation we will get to the point where we are not a target for an attack because we are seen as being secure and on the ball,” says Coull. “But obviously we will then need to continue staying at the forefront of that because as soon as we then go, ‘Okay everything's secure, we can take our eye off the ball.’ It will just be another year and then the hackers and the cybercriminals will find another way in.”