One of the things that makes humans human is the ability to learn from our mistakes. For example, when I was a kid, I learned how to talk to my parents into a later curfew or cake for breakfast. But it took several tries to get the right tone, you know what I mean?
I’m no criminal mind, but you’ve got to think that crooks are always refining their scams as well. The difference is, if they’re smart enough to use AI, their capers will be difficult to detect.
Here, then, are the top ways criminals are likely refining their misdeeds with AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
There’s a popular phishing email that looks like it’s from PayPal. Targets are directed to a fake PayPal website, told to enter their card information and—bammo—it’s in the hands of a Nefarious Nick.
It used to be pretty easy to spot these emails because the grammar and spelling was just a bit off. But AI-aided phishing emails are pretty tight on the copy front these days. Spam filters can’t always keep up to the unique emails either because there can be so many different combinations.
The laziest of criminals can have Jasper Chat write a slew of content that spreads disinformation. A cybercriminal could, for example, hold a company for ransom with the threat of releasing an article that accuses an executive of infidelity. There’s also the case where an employee clicks on a bad link in a fake news story and introduces malware to the network.
Kids in Grade One are being taught coding these days, so what are the odds that AI could be used to generate wicked and damaging malware? One of the challenges with software is that it will do what it’s told—it can’t help it! This means that Bing Chat, Microsoft’s foray into the chatbotverse, will only get more sophisticated in fabricating everything from Country & Western songs for bagpipe to, of course, generating malicious code.
With great power comes great responsibility, as they say. So software creators are constantly refining their tools to guard against the Criminal Kristies of the world. But it’s almost impossible to stop all the new potential scams.
We know how to stay ahead of the evolution of scammery, so drop us a line if you’d like some help with staff education (your #1 firewall), software updates or an overall security plan.
Ian Robertson
