The Automotive and Smart Mobility Ecosystem is entering a new era of GenAI, democratizing attacks but also cyber defenses.
On the one hand, GenAI is increasingly used by threat actors to introduce scale and new attack methods. However, GenAI will also transform automotive cybersecurity tools and workflows and introduce unprecedented efficiencies and optimizations to vehicle security operations center (vSOC) teams.
GenAI changes the balance of power. And just like in an arms race, it is critical for security stakeholders to come out ahead of malicious hackers.
GenAI offers threat actors the ability to attack at scale
GenAI is becoming a critical tool for threat actors, enabling them to effectively perform large-scale attacks and reduce barriers to entry. Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), threat actors can quickly identify vulnerabilities and learn how to exploit them. In the wrong hands, GenAI is a powerful tool for carrying out and automating complex phishing attacks, generating convincing fake content, or creating malware that can adapt and evade detection systems.
LLMs trained on cybersecurity threat intelligence data can be used to execute sophisticated attacks with automated processes and significant scale.
Ethical hacker Tom Anthony discussed the change in how hackers approach processes with AI in a recent conference, stating: “Hackers are able to use AI to speed up their processes by, for example, rapidly extending the word lists when trying to brute force systems.”
Why Automotive cybersecurity leaders must embrace GenAI’s transformative capabilities
While GenAI is increasingly used by threat actors to introduce scale and new attack methods, GenAI is also increasingly used by cybersecurity teams who are embracing GenAI’s transformative capabilities to their benefit. As stated in a recent Forrester report ‘Securing GenAI’: “Security and risk (S&R) teams need to adapt to how their enterprise plans to use generative AI, or they will find themselves unprepared to defend it.”
Furthermore, U.S.-based global consultancy firm Bain & Company assessed the contribution of generative AI to improve cybersecurity, stating in its 2023 tech report: “Generative AI is already helping analysts spot an attack faster, then better assess its scale and potential impact. Generative AI’s ability to detect and hunt threats will only get more dynamic and automated.”
VSOC 3.0 should offer efficiency and optimization to combat large-scale attacks
GenAI should be harnessed to transform the modern vSOC. With GenAI, next-generation vSOCs will be able to speed up and improve investigations, automation, data insights, and detailed analytics.
GenAI introduces unparalleled efficiencies, enabling cybersecurity teams to quickly analyze massive amounts of connected vehicle and mobility data across multiple sources, detect patterns, filter incident alerts, and automate investigations.
With today’s vSOC absorbing massive amounts of data from multiple sources, GenAI can be used to help draw insights by querying the data with simple questions. A GenAI-powered solution is capable of continuously monitoring trends, providing context and analysis of impact.
Upstream’s Ocean AI: Introducing the next generation of the vSOC
Upstream recently launched its Ocean GenAI capabilities, designed to help security teams accelerate cyber investigations and combat large-scale attacks.
Ocean AI is layered on top of the Upstream automotive purpose-built cybersecurity detection & response platform (XDR) and enables vSOC analysts to ask virtually any question they want and query the data – using natural language. The immediate result is significantly faster time to remediation so that instead of hours or even days, it goes down to minutes. In the future, as autonomous vehicles become a common standard, investigations will further need to be reduced to seconds, making GenAI an absolute must.
The vSOC 3.0 powered by Ocean AI allows OEMs, mobility IoT vendors, and smart mobility stakeholders to:
- Efficiently analyze massive amounts of cyber alerts and data from multiple sources
- Generate complex insights based on deep and dark web data
- Filter incident alerts, detect patterns, and speed investigations
- Automate vSOC workflows
If you’d like to see our GenAI capabilities, click here to schedule a demo of Ocean AI.
The 2025 Global Automotive & Smart Mobility Cybersecurity Report
