Novel social engineering attacks surge by 135 percent driven by generative AI

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New research from cybersecurity AI company Darktrace shows a 135 percent increase in social engineering attacks using sophisticated linguistic techniques, including increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length, and with no links or attachments. This trend suggests that generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are enabling threat actors to craft sophisticated and targeted attacks at speed and at scale.[AI generated]

Why's our monitor labelling this an incident or hazard?

1. The study of over 6,700 employees across the UK, US, France, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands finds 82 percent are concerned that hackers can use generative AI to create scam emails that are indistinguishable from genuine communication.
2. New research from cybersecurity AI company Darktrace shows a 135 percent increase in social engineering attacks using sophisticated linguistic techniques, including increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length, and with no links or attachments.