The Spooky Side of AI: Is Your Business Prepared?
If you look at any suburb this Halloween, you’ll see countless monsters roaming the streets. Vampires, creatures and ghouls all “wreaking havoc” (going to parties and trick-or-treating). The real monsters, though, don’t look like this. They don’t announce themselves as a threat, even jokingly. They dress themselves up in the costume of harmless, helpful allies.
While businesses just like yours are using AI tools to supercharge security and productivity, cybercriminals are using this power to disguise obvious threats with polish and poise.
As night falls and the monsters come out in full force on Halloween night, remember that keeping your business safe doesn’t mean being an expert scam-spotter. It means following a few core tenets of security to calmly recognize when you’re faced with an AI-powered threat. Garlic around your neck won’t help you here; it’s all about these simple processes and safeguards.
AI shapeshifters: Sounding right isn’t enough anymore
Video and audio files used to be a clear differentiator between someone real and someone trying to scam you into providing sensitive information. Now, with AI, scammers can take many forms, providing realistic voice messages, calls or even videos to convince you that their requests are legitimate. Even if you can spot telltale signs of AI video or audio generation, those wrinkles are getting ironed out quickly. You might not be as good at spotting them as you think, as a lot of “AI tells” are already outdated.
Instead of depending on the individual detection of an employee, focus on hard data that can’t be faked, like verification procedures for any sensitive data like money transfers or account changes. These shapeshifters present a new threat that can fool your eyes, but they can’t fake rigorous security procedures and multi-factor authentication.
AI mummies: Wrapped in a new, more dangerous cloth
In past years, phishing messages had spelling and grammatical mistakes that made them easy to spot. Typos, general addresses, the overuse of time-sensitive language and other flaws became the benchmarks to look for in phishing protection.
These same scams have much better costumes now. Dressing up these messages with perfect spelling, grammar, punctuation and readability gives them a sense of authority that many employees aren’t as skilled at seeing through.
Like an ancient mummy rising from the tomb, these scams are just as dangerous as they’ve always been, but with new, fresh rags that disguise how monstruous they really are. Move away from looking for issues within messages and look for red flags within the requests themselves. Don’t slip into comfortability with a scam email just because it gets details right and is spelled properly.
AI vampires: Never invite them in
In vampire myths, innocents are protected by not inviting vampires into their homes, as these creatures cannot enter enclosed spaces without direct permission. AI works in the same way. When employees use AI tools, especially those that aren’t approved by the company (a phenomenon called Shadow IT), there are boundless opportunities to expose sensitive data to these unvetted programs.
An AI tool can’t go into your email and read everything, but it won’t stop you if you paste a quarterly report full of sensitive financial data into the prompt field and ask it to summarize the information. If you can’t answer where this information goes, where it would be stored and what the creator of the AI tool is able to do with it, it’s not a tool that should be invited to access your protected info.
The best defense against AI monsters? Better rules.
Advancements in AI have made deception tactics and security vulnerabilities cheaper to exploit, faster to implement and more convincing even to trained eyes. If your team can internalize the small steps to protect from threats, even the most sophisticated disguises won’t trip them up.
Need help protecting your business against AI monsters coming for your data? Schedule a free 10-minute discovery call.
We’ll discuss how your employees are using AI, how sensitive requests are verified and what protections you have in place already. You’ll leave knowing where your biggest gaps are and what threats are seriously spooky this Halloween season.
Call us at 714-403-0100 or visit our website www.numanetworks.com to schedule yours.
