i24NEWS is no stranger to phishing attacks using AI, being the victim of a fraudulent site that used a similar name to pretend to be the same news agency
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the buzzword of the year, and now, it’s a key tool in cyber crimes, letting criminals impersonate almost anything, including i24NEWS.
An arms race has cropped up between cyber criminals and cybersecurity companies, as generative AI has made targeted phishing attacks faster and easier than ever.
“We can see multiple examples of malicious AI, generative AI systems – large language models like wormGPT or fraudGPT – which let users remove the ‘ethical layer’ from ChatGPT,” said Yohann Sillam, a security researcher for the Imperva software company.
“There are a lot of warnings about those tools being used to perform sophisticated phishing messages,” he told i24NEWS.
And Sillam just discovered a wide-scale AI scam that was hitting victims in Israel – and worldwide – pretending to be more than 800 different commercial domains, all looking to get a credit card number.
He explained how some phishing platforms allow users to use many different languages: “And in each language, we saw mentions or notes next to the language. Next to the Ukrainian ones, we saw ‘piggy’ written in Russian, which led us to believe it was Russians behind this large-scale attack.”
AI doppelgangers aren’t always about the money though. In fact, i24NEWS recently discovered a fraudulent site using the company’s name and AI to pretend to be the same news firm.
“Maybe they copied a headline about Russia or any other topic, but none of the stories are ours,” Pablo Vinocur, head of social media strategy at i24NEWS, recalled the recent attack. “They used our logo and our name. We have investigated, but we have no idea where it came from.”
“There could be many reasons for it,” said Sillam. “It could be entirely political, an entity somewhere wants to influence your audience in a certain direction.”
So how do we protect ourselves from AI wearing a false face? In many cases, the doppelgangers aren’t perfect, but they are just close enough to fool someone who doesn’t know what to look for: Extra numbers, letters, or words in a domain name. For example, the impersonator of i24NEWS called itself i24news.tech
The cybercrime economy is scaling faster than ever, and low-end estimates suggest billions of dollars are swindled every single year. With the advent of AI in the game, it’s becoming more critical than ever for people to learn when something is only playing human.
