Criminals want quick gains. Here’s how AI is making their life easier

Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. 

Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro.

The biggest use case for generative AI among criminals right now is phishing, which involves trying to trick people into revealing sensitive information that can be used for malicious purposes, says Mislav Balunović, an AI security researcher at ETH Zurich. Researchers have found that the rise of ChatGPT has been accompanied by a huge spike in the number of phishing emails.

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Thanks to better AI translation, different criminal groups around the world can also communicate better with each other. The risk is that they could coordinate large-scale operations that span beyond their nations and target victims in other countries, says Ciancaglini.

Generative AI has allowed deepfake development to take a big leap forward, with synthetic images, videos, and audio looking and sounding more realistic than ever. This has not gone unnoticed by the criminal underworld.

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