Phishing attacks are on the rise in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports.
“The latest figures reveal phishing is a practice that is only becoming more and more widespread,” the ABC says.“Phishing was the most reported scam to Scamwatch in 2022, with the government website recording 74,573 complaints — a 4.6 per cent increase on the previous year. In 2022, the total financial losses from phishing reported to Scamwatch and the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange totalled $157.6 million.”
Craig McDonald, founder of MailGuard, told the ABC that commodity phishing kits allow inexperienced criminals to launch sophisticated scams.
“The availability of phishing and ransomware kits is one of the drivers behind the explosion in scams,” McDonald says. “These are very sophisticated businesses. They recruit qualified coders and developers and support staff from across the globe, and offer 24/7 support for customers, because they're selling a service at the end of the day, albeit an illegal one.”
McDonald also noted that the availability of AI tools like ChatGPT make it even easier for criminals to create convincing phishing emails.
“One of the easiest ways to spot a scam is by looking for typos and grammatical errors,” McDonald said. “Now with ChatGPT or any one of hundreds of AI copywriting services, you can draft an email with perfect English. Plus, you can use the AI to check your code, and for loads of other skilled tasks that were previously a barrier to someone wanting to perpetrate a cybercrime attack.”
Ofir Turel, professor of information systems management at the University of Melbourne, told the ABC that scammers try to get their victims to react without stopping to think rationally.
“Someone gets a message,” Turel said. “The message generates a sense of urgency and there are many ways to generate this … it could be fear, it could be distracting you from thinking clearly.”
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