If you’ve noticed a spike in suspicious-looking emails in the last year or so, it might be partly due to one of our favorite AI chatbots – ChatGPT. I know – plenty of us have had intimate and private conversations where we’ve learned about ourselves with ChatGPT, and we don’t want to believe ChatGPT would help scam us.
According to cybersecurity firm SlashNext, ChatGPT and its AI cohorts are being used to pump out phishing emails at an accelerated rate. The report is founded on the firm’s threat expertise and surveyed more than three hundred cybersecurity professionals in North America. Namely, it’s claimed that malicious phishing emails have increased by 1,265% – specifically credential phishing, which rose by 967% – since the fourth quarter of 2022. Credential phishing targets your personal information like usernames, IDs, passwords, or personal pins by impersonating a trusted person, group, or organization through emails or a similar communication channel.
Malicious actors are using generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, to compose polished and specifically targeted phishing messages. As well as phishing, business email compromise (BEC) messages are another common type of cybercriminal scam, aiming to defraud companies of finances. The report concludes that these AI-fueled threats are ramping up at breakneck speed, growing rapidly in volume and how sophisticated they are.
The report indicates that phishing attacks averaged at 31,000 per day and approximately half of the surveyed cybersecurity professionals reported that they received a BEC attack. When it comes to phishing, 77% of these professionals reported that they received phishing attacks.