Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
New Era in Business Email Compromise Courtesy of ChatGPT-3

New Era in Business Email Compromise Courtesy of ChatGPT-3

Business email compromise (BEC) is a type of scam that uses legitimate or stolen email addresses to acquire money, personal information, payments, credit card numbers, and other data from businesses. Companies that conduct wire transfers, foreign supplier transactions, and invoices are particularly vulnerable to this scam.

Email attacks, including phishing, whaling, double-barrel, clone phishing, and spear-phishing, are the most common methods for phishers and hackers to lure victims into their fraud schemes.

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence capabilities have increased BEC email attacks using bot-written code, human-like text, and natural language processing(NLP). ChatGPT’s NLP capabilities produce content with near-perfect grammar and dictation in several languages, which has propelled BEC attacks into a new era of cyber attacks.

Let’s review how ChatGPT and AI continue to change the BEC threat landscape and what preventive technologies can reduce your organization’s attack surface.

BEC Then and Now

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Complaint Center (FBI IC3), businesses reported Business Email Compromise (BEC) as the most costly cybercrime in 2020, with over 19,369 complaints and an adjusted loss of $1.8 billion, making it more damaging than ransomware.

Hacker-enabling ChatGPT tools increase the attack complexity and sheer volume, free of grammatical errors. AI tools allow hackers and cybercriminals to employ automated writers globally to dispense the various BEC attacks by composing the entire email chain based on chatbot applications, artificial intelligence tools, and exciting email phishing email content. These attacks include:

  • CEO – C-Level -Whaling Attacks targeting exploitable executives
  • Supply Chain – BEC attacks are widespread against global eco-systems partners as a weak link and an entry point into larger international companies
  • HR, Payroll, and Benefits – With increased layoffs affecting technology and other industries, hackers are using this event to impersonate recruiters and hiring managers.

With ChatGPT, attackers can prompt, create unique versions of lures, and further streamline processes by automating the operation of their malicious content creation workflow.

Messages generated by ChatGPT are highly sophisticated and loaded with harmful content, including generative AI content, malware strains, and malicious code. Security researchers need help to detect this new attack variance to help prevent users from becoming exploited when carefully reviewing the phishing message.

Attacking the Security Scale and Elasticity Capabilities

ChatGPT and other AI tools create near-perfect phishing emails leading to increased difficulties in preventing a BEC attack. AI has delivered the entire kill chain of the attack faster and with more volume. Hackers can alter their attacks with AI by adding components within the kill chain that stopped due to email security.

Attack velocity is another critical nuance in the new AI-powered business email compromise era. By leveraging AI, hackers have increased the volume of attacks across multi-organizations and markets. Many legacy on-premise and cloud-based email security solutions have been brought down to similar to a network denial-of-service attack because of increases in BEC attacks and the email security solutions’ inability to process the volume attack messages.

The rising prevalence of BEC attacks increases the cost of stopping this cybercriminal activity. The business cost of phishing showed that IT and Security teams dedicate one-third of their work hours in a week to handle potential threats from phishing. 70% of organizations spent at least 16-60 minutes trying to manage and resolve single instances of phishing emails. It takes 27.5 minutes to respond to one such message, and the cost associated with this response is $31.32 per message. Most surveyors expect the upcoming year will see an increase or at least persistence in the weekly time allocated by IT/Security teams to address phishing threats.

AI-powered email attacks seem to most organizations unstoppable. However, the presumption of perfection of an AI attack is also the key the stopping these attacks.

Automation Adaptive Control Security Continues to Mature

Organizations investing in AI for business optimization and cost reduction improvements recognize the need for this capability. Return-on-investment (ROI) with AI projects continues to be a challenge for organizations supporting their digital transformation strategies. Supporting their cybersecurity strategy, AI is much more mature and proven effective.

The silver lining in the growth of the ChatGPT-3 phishing attacks compels an organization to revamp its current email security strategy to meet new and future attack vectors.

Email security, XDR, and other adaptive control integrated earlier AI capabilities years ago, foreseeing this rise in this attack vector. Reducing the effects of an AI-powered BEC attack requires an experienced email security provider with experience stopping these fresh attacks.

Email security providers like Trustifi integrated several artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in their solution to help clients protect their data and their emails against this next-generation ChatGPT and AI-powered attacks.

Trustifi Strategy – Holistic, Consolidate, and Optimize

Trustifi’s capabilities include next-generation advanced AI engines with mature learning models designed to recognize a phishing attack from an AI source. Like universities leveraging ChatGPT-Zero to scan student documents to determine if the original content came from ChatGPT. Trustifi’s advanced AI scans all inbound messages looking for similar perfections created by ChatGPT embedded inside phishing emails leading to BEC security breaches.

Trustifi’s agile platform offers several proven security controls to help prevent the following attacks:

  • BEC: Trustifi protection: Trustifi’s BEC AI is trained and designed to detect text-based emails to perform social engineering, including spoofing attacks.
  • Pre-vishing attacks: Trustifi protection: Trustifi’s proprietary metrics can detect and quarantine pre-vishing attacks by unique identifiers.
  • Spear Phishing: Trustifi protection: Trustifi uses AI, feeds, and proprietary metrics to detect and quarantine malicious emails, URLs, and files that aim to steal the recipient’s data.
  • Impersonation: Trustifi’s advanced email security platform detects and tags the impersonation of the recipient’s contacts to ensure safe correspondence with a genuine connection. Also, it can identify actual emails from a brand.
  • Account compromised: Trustifi protection: Trustifi has unique metrics to detect malicious emails and block them by supporting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC domain authentication, even though it comes from a known contact and allows listed senders. And provide account compromise detection of breached internal mailboxes.
  • New domains: Trustifi protection: Trustifi can detect additional parts, and service abuse, and quarantine the email.

Trustifi Single Console for Ease-of-Use Management

With a limited IT and security staff at most organizations, the clients need security solutions to manage more efficiently while meeting HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance mandates.

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of tools for advanced threat protection, data loss prevention, and enterprise email encryption.

Trustifi’s Email detection and response (EMDR) offers clients access to experts to assist with the implementation.

Culture

As a global cybersecurity provider of inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.

 

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