I received an email last night, that I was pretty sure was phishing, but I wasn't "completely" sure, and it got me thinking how easy it can be to fall for them. Firstly, I was on my phone which makes it harder to verify as formatting is always a little different. But more than that, it was about a delivery, and I have two separate ones I know of on the way.
This is also where they went wrong in some way also, because the post office here informs of deliveries via the app, even if they are going to be delivered through another company. So, I opened the mail so that I could see it in its entirety, and it had my business logo on it. Well, that is now obviously a scam, but for the exercise, I had a look at the links to the company (it is a legit company), however the "change delivery" went to a separate site that looked similar, but all links went back to the same change delivery page. I then visited the actual website.
Ultimately, there was a whole lot of wrong, but overall, if in a rush, if excited, if invested in getting the package quickly (or if inexperienced), there was enough right to at least fool some people I am sure. I reckon if my in-laws had received it, even if they weren't expecting a delivery, they would be answering straight away, unquestioningly.
Like everyone, I get phishing email from time to time, but I do think that it is going to get increasingly hard to identify the scam, in a large part to generative AI being able to gather and then structure the emails. In the past, the scammers would use poor quality communication as a filter, because they would send so much and to save time, they only really wanted to trick the idiots, the ones who wouldn't have the alarm bells ringing. This is because if they hooked the others, they would have to spend time with them and they weren't likely to be able to convince the smarter ones much further, so it would be time wasted.
With AI however, there is the benefit of not only being able to produce more believable content, but also sort and service that content, using AI tools to generate replies within guidelines, or even off chatbot ability. This means that the normal points to check for scam will have to change, and the time it takes to uncover the scam will be more laborsome also.
But, while there is money on the table up for grabs, there will be people looking to take it, any way they can. The attacks are going to get increasingly sophisticated and for the most part, they will be a couple steps ahead of the average person all of the time. This means that even as the tools improve, the vectors of approach will shift.
As far as I know, I haven't been heavily compromised or had any actual money taken from me, but I know people who have. After talking with them, most of the time they say there was something telling them it was not above board, but they went ahead anyway. The reason was that like I mentioned above, circumstances aligned, or they were in a rush.
The biggest risk is us.
Because, even when we do have experience, we are not infallible and our attention is often split across multiple targets. We are often not focused, not fully invested in what we are doing, not putting all of our mental power into it, and therefore more prone to making mistakes. This isn't just in terms of falling for phishing scams, but in other aspects of life as well. If we aren't paying attention to the loss of our hard-earned money,
What other opportunities are we missing?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]