IBM researchers said a ChatGPT-generated phishing email was almost as effective in fooling people compared to a man-made version.
IBM researchers said a ChatGPT-generated phishing email was almost as effective in fooling people compared to a man-made version.
So it’s less effective than a regular phishing email?
Yes, but being about the same means ChatGPT could be used to create massive amounts or personalized phishing emails at a low cost in a very short time by automation. Basically doing what they do now, but even faster.
No, those ‘mistakes’ are part of the phishing tactic. It weeds out those that are paying too much attention to the details.
And crafting a carefully targeted phishing email took a human team around 16 hours, they wrote, while ChatGPT took just minutes
This is significant because any person with the desire to scam can use ChatGPT from the comfort of their own home over lunch instead of hiring professionals for a few days.
And crafting a carefully targeted phishing email took a human team around 16 hours
Ummm what? Back in college, I used to budget 30-45 minutes a page for essays. What the hell are they writing that took a team of people 16 fucking hours for a few paragraphs of text?
A targeted phishing email is usually pretty sophisticated and requires days or weeks of research. For example, you might send an email pretending to be from someone’s IT department regarding a hardware audit, and ask a user to report back with the barcode sticker on their laptop, providing them with a photo of an example tag in similar format. You’ll pretend to be a specific individual at the company, or a contractor the company actually uses, and show knowledge of the internal software and hardware, and refer to other real employees by name/email to establish trust. Most of this data will be scraped from publicly available sources like LinkedIn profiles, job listings, and photos shared on social media by employees. This process is called OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) and it’s a fascinating rabbithole to read about. Targeted phishing attempts are much, much more sophisticated than the ones you’ll see in spam email.
This is pretty much what happened at the company I work for. The assistant to the CEO received an email that appeared like it came from the CEO requesting confidential financial information. The email contained mannerisms of the CEO, was sent when the CEO was out of the office, etc. The assistant almost fell for it… She would have if our mail system didn’t clearly flag external emails so that it’s obvious they weren’t sent internally.
My old employer would get a call every few months from someone pretending to be our client and informing us we should change the banking information. No one could figure out how they figured out that there was a business relationship between the two companies let alone who was the financial person at my job.
To be honest, phishing emails are so bad that I don’t see how any generational AI couldn’t be better. Just making less than two typos per sentence would e enough.
Someone explained me that it may be intentional that phishing emails are so bad as it acts as a pre-filter, then you only spend time and ressources dealing with presumably very gullible people.
The typos are intentional. They filter out intelligent recipients who wouldn’t fall for the scam.
The typos have been theorized to be intentional (for that reason), but that isn’t the only theory, and afaik those theories aren’t based off conversations with the people crafting those emails.
It’s also been theorized that phishing emails frequently have typos (intentionally) to lower people’s resistance to well-crafted phishing emails, particular spear phishing.
There’s also the fact that many phishing emails are crafted by people for whom English is not their first language, and even given that, phishing emails are still better written than spam emails, so it’s quite likely that in many cases it isn’t intentional at all.
Looking forward to the day when I use Darktrace’s AI threat detection to stop ChatGPT’s AI generated threats…
What a world we’ve built!
Why haven’t people learned yet to simply never click a link in an email? Even if it’s not malicious, it’s still trying to track you.
Images in emails also track you fwiw, as your browser or email client has to send a request to load it. Disable loading images by default.
