AI-Assisted Social Engineering is a Growing Concern

A survey by the World Economic Forum (WEF) found that 47% of organizations cite the advancement of adversarial capabilities as their top concern surrounding generative AI.

These capabilities include phishing, malware development, and deepfakes, all of which are increasingly accessible due to AI tools. Additionally, 42% of organizations experienced a successful social engineering attack last year, and the researchers expect this number to rise as AI-assisted social engineering grows more advanced.

“Cybercriminals are using GenAI to convincingly replicate the communication styles of an organization’s senior leaders. These tools harness contextual data from sources such as social media, public statements, or leaked documents, making social engineering attempts much more sophisticated and challenging to identify.

“GenAI also supports attackers in developing credible social engineering attacks in a wider range of languages, which helps threat actors target a greater number of people in more countries at a lower cost.”

Additionally, AI tools allow unskilled threat actors to launch sophisticated attacks with very little effort.

“GenAI lowers the barriers to entry into the cybercrime arena in terms of cost and required expertise,” the report says. “GenAI is expected to streamline the process from the exploitation of vulnerabilities to the deployment of malware, scaling up operations that were previously reliant solely on human capabilities.”

The report adds, “With staff remaining the real target of deepfake attacks, as well as phishing campaigns in general, organizations will need to rethink how they train and protect everyone, from employees to the C-suite and board, about new patterns of cybercrime.”

AI-powered security awareness training can give your organization an essential layer of defense against phishing attacks. KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 70,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 HRM+ platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.

The WEF has the story.