Advanced email attacks, including phishing and business email compromise (BEC), are surging in the manufacturing sector as cybercriminals target an industry with a low tolerance for downtime.
Phishing attacks in the sector have surged 83% in the past 12 months, with Generative AI technologies enabling threat actors create greater volumes of sophisticated email attacks.
Mike Britton, CIO at Abnormal Security, told Infosecurity that the spike in phishing activity is partly due to generative AI tools ensuring these messages lack the characteristics most commonly associated with phishing emails, such as poor spelling and grammar.
“Now, even inexperienced petty criminals can leverage widely accessible tools like ChatGPT to craft perfectly written, personalized, and seemingly realistic emails, making them exponentially more difficult for employees to identify,” he explained.
Britton added that attackers are now able to use AI to scale and layer in additional specificity and customization into phishing emails at ease, making such attempts “nearly impossible” for legacy email controls, such as secure email gateways, to stop.
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