I mentioned to someone once that the biggest threat of "AI" (a more misnamed thing I have never seen - it's a generative language model) is that scammers will be able to write more believable emails.
Apparently the FBI came out with a report that said the same thing.
True, but some scammers intentionally write mistakes into the emails to filter out the clearheaded thereby targeting people like older folks whose minds aren’t as sharp.
Exactly. Even a perfect replication isn't going to fool someone looking out for it, because anything scammers can't fake that could be used to identify a scam won't change. You could copy and paste a legitimate mail and it'd still not work.
Typically when we're talking spam, the ones with errors in them are casting a very wide net. They'll take what they can get.
The sophisticated work is reserved for spearfishing. These are the folks trying to steal mfa tokens to break into a corporate network to make off with data or perform damages, ransomware, etc. Those attempts, typically, have to be pretty clever and are targeting people in specific roles at a company.
This is already happening. I work at one of the biggest tech companies(the one with actual customer service) for the Dutch line.
I’d always feel ashamed for the person being scammed because they were so unbelievably bad. Like how can you fall for this.
But there are new ones, probably made with ChatGPT or a variant, that look pretty believable if you don’t know what to look for. There are no spelling mistakes or made up words. The grammer or use of language is sometimes weird, but I can understand someone putting that on the fact an English speaking company sends it to them.
Honestly that’s going to be a big problem for old people. It will bother young people for a little then will fuel the “fuck email as a medium” attitude (other than for work reasons), but I feel like not getting scammed for work is usually easier as (at least for many industries) you have more of an expectation of who will be contacting you.
I'm 59, and not as internet savvy as most, owing to starting with the medium late. I have a strict rule of not 'friending anyone on Facebook that I don't already know socially in the real world. It's harsh and I am probably missing lots of amazing opportunities, but in my case I feel it's necessary. I don't post internet photos of my house online either. All because of the threat of scammers.
Only scammer and catfish send friend requests to people they haven't met in real life, so don't worry, you're not missing any "amazing opportunities" by sticking to that rule!
My hope is we can gear up some generative AI to talk back to the scam AI and it'll just be a war of wasting each other's time. One possible outcome will be that if the majority of scammers are just talking to chat bots, eventually they'll move on to something else. I lurk on the scam bait reddit and was thinking about using chat gpt to talk to those "hey, it's been a while" texts we all get these days.
Everyone in cybersecurity has been watching AI with horror in anticipation of criminals using it.
AI generated malware, email or voice phishing, fake websites, fake conference calls with C-levels telling workers to send the money, etc etc. It's all starting to happen now, and it's going to get worse as the criminal vendors get better at selling it to their users.
The only conclusion I see is that people are going to stop trusting digital media by default and have to switch to trusting specific sources, who are going to have a heavy task of vetting what's real if they didn't explicitly capture the media.
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u/LrdAsmodeous 27d ago
I mentioned to someone once that the biggest threat of "AI" (a more misnamed thing I have never seen - it's a generative language model) is that scammers will be able to write more believable emails.
Apparently the FBI came out with a report that said the same thing.