A growing number of cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence to target Australian enterprises, often employing this tech to generate deepfakes mimicking staff members’ voices and looks.
Small and medium-sized businesses were at highest risk from the emerging trend, but almost all Australian organisations had encountered AI-based online attacks over the past year, a report has found.
The security company SoSafe has published the insights from their Cybercrime Trends report, revealing that Australia is among the countries frequently subjected to AI-driven cyberattacks.
The warnings come one month after some of the nation's biggest superannuation firms were hit with a co-ordinated online attack that saw $750,000 stolen from personal accounts.
Sydney animal vaccine firm Virbac has been regularly targeted by hackers who use AI to create realistic invoices.
Chris Mousley, who works as a supply chain analytics specialist at the company, mentioned that Virbac had to train employees and alter their procedures for compensating suppliers to prevent theft from cybercriminals.
"I get at least five to 10 of these a month and they're extremely convincing commercial documents that look like pro-forma invoices," Mr Mousley said.
"These are very specific documents and they're AI-generated to look like companies we would deal with."
The fake invoices were often for specific raw materials, he said, which indicated criminals were specifically targeting the firm and its industry.
AI software was not only being used to improve the grammar and apparent legitimacy of email scams, but to craft targeted and sophisticated attacks across different platforms, SoSafe human-centric security advocate Jacqueline Jayne said.
"We've had deepfakes using people's voices to pretend to be someone on the phone and it is incredibly difficult, unless you have a code word, to be able to tell are we talking to (a colleague) or is this someone pretending to be her," she said.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between them.
The Cybercrime Trends report, published on Friday, was compiled by research firm Censuswide and involved surveying 500 IT professionals from nine different nations.
Even though they are common, just one-quarter of IT professionals assessed their capability to identify AI-driven attacks as "high."
The study revealed that most Australian organizations have faced assaults targeted at employees' personal gadgets like smartphones and notebooks.
Businesses fell victim to "omnichannel assaults" which utilized their emails, social media profiles, messaging applications, and phone calls.
Educating employees in how to detect deepfake scams would be vital to shutting down the attacks, particularly in small and medium-sized businesses that often did not deploy the same level of cybersecurity, Ms Jayne said.
"We're going to see more AI-assisted and driven attacks in Australia and globally," she told vtrik.
"One way to address it is to think about what humans are doing, how they're responding to (attacks), and how we can help them to think before they do anything."
Companies needed to educate staff in how to scrutinise incoming communication carefully, Mr Mousley said.
This involved searching for clues like typos and varied payment approaches, along with performing credit assessments on nearby businesses.
He stated, 'Complacency is not an option.'
They didn't receive any of these over the past 12 months.
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