How Generative AI Is Making Business Email Compromise Harder to Detect
Summary
The article explains how generative AI can help attackers create more convincing BEC campaigns and argues for behavior-based email defenses that identify unusual activity rather than relying only on known attack patterns.
Key points
- BEC uses email and trust to trick employees into transferring money or disclosing sensitive company data, often through pretexting rather than malicious links or attachments.
- The article says generative AI can help attackers produce personalized, grammatically polished, multilingual emails and scale social-engineering campaigns.
- Darktrace reports a 135% rise in novel social-engineering attacks across its email customers in 2023, coinciding with widespread adoption of ChatGPT.
- Rules and signatures may miss BEC messages that use novel language, lack payloads, or come from senders that later appear legitimate.
- The article recommends defenses that learn normal communication and business behavior to flag anomalous activity, and promotes Darktrace / EMAIL as an example.
- Darktrace claims its product can block novel threats up to 13 days faster than traditional security tools.
Article Details
- Topic
- Business email compromise and how generative AI is changing BEC attacks and defenses
Vendors
DarktraceIn 2023, Darktrace researchers observed a 135% rise in ‘novel social engineering attacks’ across Darktrace / EMAIL customers, corresponding with the widespread adoption of ChatGPT.OpenAIand becoming harder to detect. By adding ingenuity, machine speed, and scale, generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT give threat actors the ability to create more personalized, targeted, and convincing emails at
Products
ChatGPTharder to detect. By adding ingenuity, machine speed, and scale, generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT give threat actors the ability to create more personalized, targeted, and convincing emails at scale.Darktrace / EMAILIn 2023, Darktrace researchers observed a 135% rise in ‘novel social engineering attacks’ across Darktrace / EMAIL customers, corresponding with the widespread adoption of ChatGPT.