"The perfect phishing email": Using AI text generators against executives
AI technology enables criminals to send highly personalized phishing emails to executives, warns an insurer. Training material is available online.
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High-ranking executives at companies are the target of an increasing number of "hyper-personalized" phishing emails written with the help of AI generators. The British insurance group Beazley and other companies are warning of this, reports the Financial Times. The newspaper quotes Beazley's head of security as saying that the situation is getting worse and worse, with targeted attack attempts based on scraping "immense amounts" of information about the person being attacked. A manager from the software company Check Point recently pointed out that AI technology enables criminals to write "the perfect phishing email".
Highly personalized contact attempts
Phishing emails are messages that appear to come from a trustworthy person but are actually fraudulent. The British newspaper refers to analyses, according to which by far the most successful cyberattacks begin with phishing that someone falls for. Thanks to the rapid and major advances in the development of AI technology, these initial contacts can now be tailored to target persons to a much greater extent and completely automatically. For example, they can be trained based on the target's activities in social networks.
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"The availability of generative AI tools lowers the barrier to entry for advanced cybercrime," says eBay security researcher Nadezda Demidova. Although all types of cyberattacks are increasing, the growth in "sophisticated and targeted" phishing emails is particularly high, she is quoted as saying by the Financial Times. Conventional mail filters could also run into problems if AI technology is used to generate thousands of emails with different wording in quick succession. Executives are particularly worthwhile targets for such attacks, but it can be assumed that such attacks will also increase against the rest of the population.
(mho)
