AI Rears Its Head as a Cyber Threat

By David Weldon for GARP
Friday, May 10, 2024

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GenAI lends itself to phishing, smishing, vishing (voice phishing), BEC (business email compromise) and whaling (spear phishing that targets high-ranking company officials) – known hazards that may involve social engineering, human deception and fraud. To Ilia Kolochenko, CEO and chief architect at application security specialist ImmuniWeb, “GenAI provides little to no help with sophisticated ransomware campaigns, disruptive cyberattacks against critical national infrastructure, or industrial espionage with advanced persistent threats aiming at stealing top-secret information from governments or valuable trade secrets from large businesses.

“In 2024,” Kolochenko continues, “organized cybercrime groups have all the requisite resources and skills, such as state-of-the-art malware development, producing substantially superior quality of cyber warfare compared to any LLM even after fine-tuning of the LLM.”

That said, Kolochenko advises that any authentication system based on a client’s voice or visual appearance be urgently tested for deepfake and AI-generated content. Employees who might be targeted to receive deceptive emails or texts should also be trained – and their training regularly refreshed – to spot red flags and to prevent and report identity fraud.

GenAI can help cybersecurity, compliance and risk professionals intelligently automate and accelerate simple but laborious tasks and free them up to address higher or more challenging priorities, Kolochenko says. Read Full Article