AI and its use in email threat creation and prevention

Artificial Intelligence is being lauded as the next great thing, the ‘splitting the atom’ of our time, one that will revolutionise our lives, indeed its application in medicine, education and human benefits is astounding and should be applauded.

Unfortunately AI, unlike the early days of nuclear advancement does not require rare raw materials, manpower and hundreds of millions in cash to use as an individual. Now with the advent of Large Language Models available to the public, AI is being fed daily, for free by millions of ‘freeware’ users.

From a security perspective this is frightening, there are already content creators who are showing how to harvest email addresses based on end user profiles and then target them with marketing messages, essentially industrial grade spamming but in a refined way based on the intelligence that AI model has learned.

As social engineering becomes more prevalent it is not unreasonable to expect AI to be used to build profiles, learn about the target individuals from all areas of public internet and social media, then generate specific, eloquent, humanised email content relative to the individual to entice interaction or deliver weaponised emails looking to gain access to companies by criminal gangs.

The possibilities are, sadly, endless.

Conversely, AI is challenged when it comes to defending against AI based content. The clue is in its name – Artificial Intelligence. The intelligence comes from knowledge, if the AI model defending your email security perimeter does not possess the knowledge then it does the next best thing – makes an educated guess. According to google most spam emails last only 12 minutes before being recycled thus the challenge here is that the receiving AI sees a beautifully crafted email seemingly genuine and allows that email through because it does not have enough knowledge or exposure to the threat, or instead stops an important email from a customer because it ‘guesses’ that it might be spam.

AI vs AI for email is in its infancy, its just going to get more and more advanced, but there can be no winner of the war, only land grads and battles won as each model fights against the others for superiority at lighting speed.

Photo by Hack Capital on Unsplash