AI creates phishing emails better than humans
Miscellaneous / / August 09, 2021
But it will be problematic for fraudsters to use it.
Neural networks continue to show amazing results in a wide variety of tasks. True, this time their work was not at all noble: with the help of AI, Singaporean researchers created phishing emails that proved to be more convincing than those written by real people.
In particular, at the Black Hat and Defcon cybersecurity conferences held in Las Vegas last week, experts from the Government Technology Agency (Singapore) told about the results of an unusual experiment.
They wrote hundreds of phishing emails on their own, and then created as many more using the natural language processing algorithm GPT-3 and other artificial intelligence technologies. They then sent those letters out to 200 colleagues to test which ones they thought were more convincing.
In both cases, the emails contained tracker links - they did not download the virus to the device, but simply sent a click report to the researchers. The result was surprising: people "significantly more often" clicked on the links of letters composed by artificial intelligence than those written by other people. Unfortunately, no exact statistics are provided.
The authors note that the letters written by the AI sounded "surprisingly human" and that the platform automatically added unexpected elements, to make the text more convincing - for example, she cited Singapore laws, since the input indicated that the recipients from Singapore.
Experts have long been debating whether it makes sense for scammers to train neural networks to create phishing emails - after all, mass mailings remain extremely effective and cost-effective. But if you need targeted emails, the compilation of which requires additional work, neural networks can really be useful.
While this may sound daunting, the good news is that quality AI training costs millions of dollars - probably not. expect that in the near future scammers will massively decide to fork out to improve the system, which is already excellent working.
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