With a rise in use of AI, cybersecurity has become a greater challenge for businesses than ever before. Smarter phishing attacks, use of stolen information, and fabricated video and voice content involving AI have all been contributing to an increase of data breaches. Learn more about the latest cybersecurity threats and how to combat them.
AI phishing and spearfishing
AI phishing is becoming a bigger problem due to smarter phishing attacks. In the past, phishing attacks were easier to identify due to misspellings, incorrect grammar, and formatting issues. But now, criminals are employing AI to eliminate mistakes and impersonate real people and companies with more intelligent writing and formats. More attacks are appearing to come from legitimate sources by impersonating commonly used services, such as Amazon or the postal service rather than the notorious “Nigerian princes.” AI also enables attacks on a larger scale than is possible through sheer human capabilities.
There has also been a rise in spear phishing attacks — the targeting of specific individuals with stolen information from data breaches and social media sites. These attacks are more personalized and convincing, making them more likely to trick recipients into betraying personal data.
At Black Hat USA 2021, for example, Singapore’s Government Technology Agency presented the results of an experiment in which the security team sent simulated spear phishing emails to internal users. Some were human-crafted, and others were generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology. More people clicked the links in the AI-generated phishing emails than in the human-written ones — by a significant margin.
Manipulated video and voice content
Additionally, advances in AI technology are enabling hackers to impersonate family members and coworkers through AI voice and video cloning (deepfakes). Fake audio and visual content can appear hyperrealistic and dupe victims into revealing confidential information or authorizing money transfers.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert Tripp commented:
As technology continues to evolve, so do cybercriminals’ tactics. Attackers are leveraging AI to craft highly convincing voice or video messages and emails to enable fraud schemes against individuals and businesses alike. These sophisticated tactics can result in devastating financial losses, reputational damage, and compromise of sensitive data.
Think you’re too smart for it to happen to you? Don’t be so sure. MGM Resorts was recently subject to a large-scale ransomware attack after a cybercriminal impersonated an employee calling the IT desk. After obtaining access to the employee’s account through resetting the password, the criminal gained access to their network. The breech reportedly cost the company $100 million.
How to combat AI cybersecurity threats
How do businesses ensure their data is safe from AI-equipped scammers? Make sure that employees are trained to recognize suspicious activity. Employees should be on high alert when receiving messages asking for money or credentials. Another step is enabling multi-factor authentication. As always, don’t click questionable links, download files, or share personal data. Enable email filters and antivirus software as a first responder to catch phishing attempts. Finally, fight fire with fire — make use of AI to identify AI attacks, finding weak spots and predicting threats.
ALTERNcloud’s Edge DNS & Next-gen Edge CDN Services
Properly managing cybersecurity risks is paramount for businesses and consumers alike. That’s why it’s important to have both DNS (Domain Name System) and CDN (Content Delivery Network) management services you trust. ALTERNcloud’s Edge DNS and Next-gen Edge CDN start at just $20.00/month and $35.00/month, respectively.
Edge DNS
DNS is no longer a simple point and click domain management service. It has evolved into a critical optimization tool for network administrators and DevOps alike. We provide real-time traffic routing to optimize the resolution process and offer a global DNS with data centers and PoPs, which mitigates any latency due to distance. We augment our managed DNS services with built-in network monitoring, health checks, performance monitoring, and query analytics. We ingest data from these sources and use it to optimize how traffic flows to your cloud services. Five managed domains and five million queries total are included.
Next-gen Edge CDN
At ALTERNcloud, our globally distributed network consists of more than 150 CDN PoPs and 25 secure Cloud locations. All products and services seamlessly integrate state-of-the-art DDoS and web protection and natively integrate with each other. Plus, our infrastructure lets us tailor our systems to perfectly fit our customers’ individual needs. Pricing starts at $35/month and includes 5 managed CDN resources and 1.5TB traffic per month. After that, only pay for what you use: $2 per additional CDN resource, and from $0.0273 per GB of Egress traffic billed monthly.
