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A discussion of how – and why – adversaries are using artificial intelligence to juice up malicious activities

When antivirus (AV) software first arrived in the late 1980s, the science of combating computer viruses was very straightforward.

AV kept close track of known malicious files, and then quarantined or deleted any known malware that had managed to embed itself on the protected computing device. At its core, AV still does that today.

Threat actors, of course, responded by engaging AV vendors in what has turned out to be a decades-long contest of one-upmanship. They quickened their pace of creating sprawling families of malware, putting AV vendors in an endless chase to identify, and blacklist, new malware variants as quickly as possible.

What began as a game of checkers, quickly advanced to chess and then to 3D chess. That brings us to today, where AV vendors and malware distributors are engaged in a 3D chess match -- infused by artificial intelligence, or AI.

I recently visited with Rajarshi Gupta, head of AI at Avast, who gave me a breakdown of how threat actors, today, are leveraging AI to support their malicious activities. Here are excerpts of our discussion, edited for clarity and length.