Look out for hyper-personalized phishing attacks, powered by AI

Phishing attacks will become more convincing. A new report warns scammers are now using AI Scrape information about you from your online profile to send hyper-personalized emails specific to your login credentials.

By finding out everything from your employer to your interests, scammers can send emails that are more likely to look genuine…

Phishing has always been around. Scammers send out mass emails claiming to be from banks, email providers, cryptocurrency providers, and popular companies like Amazon apple.

Fake content is often designed to create a sense of urgency. For example, your bank warns you about a fraudulent transaction, Amazon sends you an invoice for an expensive product you haven’t ordered, or Apple tells you that your iCloud account is about to be cancelled.

The hope is that the victim will panic and click on the link and use their login credentials before they have time to consider whether the link is genuine.

Most of these attacks are very general, but financial times The report warns that this is now changing. Scammers are starting to use artificial intelligence to scrape publicly available profiles to produce emails that appear to know a lot about you and therefore potentially trick more people into thinking the emails are real.

Leading companies including British insurance company Beazley and e-commerce group eBay have warned of an increase in scam emails containing personal details that may have been obtained through artificial intelligence analysis of online profiles.

“It’s getting worse and it’s getting very personal, which is why we suspect artificial intelligence is behind it,” said Kirsty Kelly, chief information security officer at Beazley. “We’re starting to see very targeted attacks. These attacks have stolen a lot of information about someone.”

Highly personalized phishing emails are also more likely to slip through filters created by companies and email providers like Apple and Google.

Currently, the main targets appear to be corporate employees, with the AI ​​bots even copying writing styles from specific company websites and other public content to add to their scams. But the same techniques can also be used against consumers, such as by scraping your social media profiles.

The main measures to protect against phishing attacks are no way Click the link sent in the email. Always use your own bookmarks, or enter a known URL.

photography: taylor france exist Not splashed