Oh Great … Now AI is Improving Cyber Scams!
July 23, 2024
A recent Harvard Business Review article puts the spotlight on how artificial intelligence is making deceptive phishing e-mails “more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous.”
Gone are the days of the poorly worded emails from someone you’ve never met saying you are owed a large amount of money and need to act fast to get paid. Or the one where your bank wants you to click a link sent from an email address that is a series of random letters and numbers.
If you’ve ever wondered how phishing works on the backend, here are the basics. Criminals generally follow these five phases to attack their victims and improve their chances of scam success:
- Identify the target
- Collect as much information as possible about the target by using social engineering techniques, such as looking at social media accounts and collecting data that gets leaked from public data breaches
- Create the fraudulent email
- Send the email to the target
- Validate and improve the emails (and repeat)
AI has been especially helpful in the fifth phase as it learns what works and what doesn’t. What’s most frightening is that AI helps improve scam email believability for victims.
Protecting your organization or practice from this type of scam is essential to safeguarding sensitive financial information, preventing theft from bank accounts and protecting patients! ISMIE’s cybersecurity resource provides an overview of the risks, potential threats and what you can do in these situations.
If you experience a cyberattack or suspect your organization’s cybersecurity has been breached, ISMIE is here to help! Contact our Claims Division as soon as possible by calling 800-782-4767, extension 3510, or by email.