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Corporate executives are facing a flood of hyper-personalized phishing scams generated by artificial intelligence bots as rapidly evolving technology makes advanced cybercrimes easier.
Leading corporations resembling British insurer Beazley and e-commerce group eBay have warned of the rise in fraudulent emails containing personal information likely obtained through AI evaluation of online profiles.
“This is getting worse and it's becoming very personal and that's why we suspect AI is behind it,” said Kirsty Kelly, chief information security officer at Beazley. “Very targeted attacks occur many times that capture an immense amount of data a couple of person.”
Cybersecurity experts said the increasing attacks come at a time of rapid advancement in AI technology, as tech corporations race to develop increasingly sophisticated systems and convey popular products to consumers and businesses.
AI bots can quickly ingest large amounts of knowledge about an organization or individual's tone and magnificence and reproduce these characteristics to create a convincing scam.
They also can evaluate a victim's online presence and social media activity to find out which topics they’re almost definitely to reply to – helping hackers create tailored phishing scams at scale.
“The availability of generative AI tools lowers the barrier to entry for advanced cybercrimes,” said Nadezda Demidova, cybercrime security researcher at eBay. “We have seen a rise in the quantity of all sorts of cyber attacks,” particularly “sophisticated and targeted” phishing scams, she added.
Kip Meintzer, an executive at security company Check Point Software Technologies, said at a recent investor conference that AI has given hackers “the power to put in writing the right phishing email.”
According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, greater than 90 percent of successful cyberattacks begin with a phishing email. As these attacks change into more sophisticated, their consequences change into increasingly expensive: According to IBM, the worldwide average cost of an information breach will rise by almost 10 percent to $4.9 million in 2024.
Researchers have warned that AI is especially effective at creating corporate email compromise scams – a special sort of malware-free phishing through which fraudsters trick recipients into transferring money or revealing sensitive company information. According to the FBI, this kind of fraud has cost victims greater than $50 billion worldwide since 2013.
AI might be “used to scan all the pieces to see where there’s a vulnerability, whether within the code or the human chain,” said Sean Joyce, global cybersecurity leader at PwC.
AI-generated phishing scams can also be more prone to bypass corporations' email filters and cybersecurity training.
Simple filters that generally block repeated mass phishing campaigns may struggle to trace these scams if AI is used to quickly generate 1000’s of reworded messages, eBay's Demidova said.
