The email may seem genuine, and the link that it includes hard to resist: a package held at customs, a notification from the bank about a credit card charge… perhaps even a prize that we won. Phishing cyberattacks are a real threat, one that takes advantage of the weakest link in the chain: humans.
The scam works through deception. The attacker creates emails or text messages that look virtually identical to the ones from the company they’re trying to impersonate, usually urging the recipient to either click on a link or open an attachment; the former to harvest credit card or banking data, the latter to introduce some type of malicious software into the system.
AI to escalate the attacks
Regarding the amount and precision of the phishing attacks, prospects are not good. “Advances in artificial intelligence will cause a frenzy of identity theft,” explains Francisco Arnau, regional vice president of cybersecurity firm Akamai for Spain and Portugal. “Looking forward, we can expect that constant advances in artificial intelligence, such as those seen in systems like GPT-3, will make targeted phishing more compelling, scalable and common.”
These systems allow for the generation of “millions of email or text messages, each one tailored to an individual recipient, and each one with compelling human-like qualities,” Arnau continues. This will pose a significant challenge to existing anti-phishing technologies and “will make it much more difficult for people to…
