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The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

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Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#81

Post by reginald78 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #13
WesternWind wrote: post #2

Hey, just going to say what I've been telling folks IRL, if you are reading this, and your parents and family members aren't tech savvy, you need to set them up with two factor authentication now. Because you know how to do that, and it's so much easier than helping them when they get hacked.

As evidence of the current state of play: Friend receives an email from ISP, asking her to contact them. She searches, comes across a "customer service number" on a legit looking page, calls them up. (Whoever she called) plays out a 30 minute charade about how she's been flagged by IRS for illegal activity and is about to have her business accounts frozen, including multiple phone transfers to "another party" (played…

And since actual ISP customer service is actually this terrible much of the time it wouldn't even set off alarm bells.

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#82

Post by Der_Einzige »

dbspin wrote: post #75

I'm kind of amazed how slow 'AI phishing' has been to roll out. The technology for customised text based attacks at scale has been available at least since Llama was open sourced. The tech for custom voice and image based attacks is basically there too with whisper / tortoise and stable diffusion - though clearly more expensive to render. I'm honestly not sure why social networks aren't being leveraged more to target…

It appears that criminals really are stupid, and thank goodness for it!

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#83

Post by reginald78 »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #26
sroussey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, used extensively

When I call my bank they verify with my voice. There are further verification for meaningful actions but its still kind of crazy to be using "My Voice is my Password" this day in age.

Especially since "My Voice is my Passport" was defeated in that movie with a tape recorder and technology at the time. It was never a good idea and even the movie didn't seem to think so.

Yet my bank just turned this on for me as well in 2024. Now I have to figure out how to disable it...and will it really be disabled?

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#84

Post by reginald78 »

immibis wrote: post #29
jimmaswell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the practical alternative?

Scanning your digital ID card would be a start, but oHnO that's cOmmUniSM!

Wouldn't this just result in my digitalid getting lost in the next equifax breech?

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#85

Post by switch007 »

HPsquared wrote: post #60
nottorp wrote: post #59

> Is it your fate now to do due diligence on every email you receive? Always has been. Tbh the browser/email client makers are complicit in these phishing attempts for hiding the URLs and the actual email addresses. Put them back!

Also the URL "security scanner" things on corporate email systems. The user can't see the URL by hovering over it.

When the security team does that, they give up all right to tell people to analyse URLs, and assume all responsibility for anything bad happening from clicking on links. As they're advertising links as secure

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#86

Post by IanCal »

irjustin wrote: post #54
snowfield wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes the other way now, overly verbose responses and perfect grammar sets off the warning bells.

They'll adapt. You can easily ask chat4 to make it sound "less formal" or "more teenager"

Absolutely. I was talking to a teacher and they said the translations were easy to spot because they were so good, far beyond what the kid was normally doing. I then showed them the same kind of prompt plus something like "write this as an X year old French student with only moderate grasp of ..." and it was far more plausible.

I noticed how well it understands general parlance after it created marketing style copy for me and I told it to sound "less wanky" and it made it much more to the point.

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#87

Post by jjulius »

dbspin wrote: post #75

I'm kind of amazed how slow 'AI phishing' has been to roll out. The technology for customised text based attacks at scale has been available at least since Llama was open sourced. The tech for custom voice and image based attacks is basically there too with whisper / tortoise and stable diffusion - though clearly more expensive to render. I'm honestly not sure why social networks aren't being leveraged more to target…

Forgive my ignorance, but why are we surprised that voice messages aren't being spoofed more often? Doesn't this require a pretty darn decent dataset for training? Unless they've got a ton of videos of themselves shared on a public social media profile, I don't know that this is going to be a thing.

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#88

Post by kibwen »

dghughes wrote: post #74
psychoslave wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was called by an Indian like ten years ago, trying to convince me to follow some script obviously made for Windows when at the time I already hadn’t a Windows box for quite some time. Fun moment, in that specific case. Probably the funniest thing here is that this call reached me despite the fact that I am French, living in France. And so I really wonder how they ended up calling me. I mean, chance I would understa…

It seems like the majority are from India but no surprise with a population that's technical and soon to exceed China's population. CBC the Canadian nations news service has been trying to track scammers in India https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/tech-support-scam-india-market... Even Jim Browning and Kit Boga on YouTube two guys who scam the scammers it seems to be 100% people based in India.

> soon to exceed China's population

Note that India has had a larger population than China for at least a year or two.

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#89

Post by diatone »

dbspin wrote: post #75

I'm kind of amazed how slow 'AI phishing' has been to roll out. The technology for customised text based attacks at scale has been available at least since Llama was open sourced. The tech for custom voice and image based attacks is basically there too with whisper / tortoise and stable diffusion - though clearly more expensive to render. I'm honestly not sure why social networks aren't being leveraged more to target…

It’s not enough for the method to be possible, it has to be economical. If it’s not prevalent yet it means one of two things:

(1) cheaper methods work too well for now to even bother with sophisticated approaches

(2) it’s too expensive to be worth the effort

It would be interesting to plot out the cost of an integrated AI stack for this over time.

Re: The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing

#90

Post by manishsharan »

This is going to become so much worse

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40942307

Imagine old people getting phone calls from frantic children. They won't know real from fake. Add tech like this to SIM forgery ..and we will devolve from a high trust society to a no trust society.

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