Security News > 2024 > January > Flipping the BEC funnel: Phishing in the age of GenAI

This shift in phishing philosophies has also led to a precipitous decline in the use of malicious payloads in phishing emails - presumably to avoid detection from the more capable email security solutions of today.

It appears this inherent constraint on scale is now a thing of the past, with the emergence of generative AI effectively flipping the funnel on phishing speed and scale.

Interestingly, researchers have been aware of GenAI's potential for supercharging phishing campaigns since 2021, with some even publishing research demonstrating the ability of OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate significantly more sophisticated and effective phishing emails in a fraction of the time.

Now, over a year since GenAI tools entered the mainstream, they've managed to completely upend the traditional trade-off between quality and quantity that once held phishing content creation in check.

In addition to deploying the right AI security tools, every CISO should prioritize security awareness training and phishing simulation testing.

The landscape of phishing attacks has evolved significantly in recent years, with threat actors employing more advanced techniques that target specific individuals, groups, or organizations with the scale and sophistication that many legacy email solutions cannot protect against.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2024/01/15/genai-tools-phishing/