Global cybercrime is expected to cost more than ten trillion dollars this year. Scams and online criminal activity have exploded through the use of artificial intelligence.
AI-enabled crimes are already up 456% since last year.
Email phishing attacks, identity theft, ransomware attacks, financial scams, and deepfake child pornography are all becoming more sophisticated and prevalent.
Artificial intelligence has become the tool of choice for online criminals because it is erasing the line between the real and the fake. Google's newly announced video generator is about to flood the internet with AI-created clips that have the look of expensive films.
AI can take any video of someone and turn it into a very realistic deepfake that says or does anything the creator programs it to do.
"I've never seen anything move faster in my lifetime than AI. Not the internet, not crypto, not anything else. And what we're doing is we're measuring this technology in days," says former federal prosecutor Ari Redbord, the global head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company.
Redbord says, "Criminals are often early adopters of new transformative technologies. AI has removed the human bottleneck from scams, from cybercrime and from other types of illicit activity."
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State actors such as China and North Korea are using AI against Americans to influence politics, social issues, and to steal.
"North Korea just stole $1.5 billion in one day to use for weapons proliferation and other destabilizing activity," says Redbord. "They're now using AI and data science to programmatically launder the funds from that hack."
"Every major American adversary is experimenting with AI," says Leah Siskind, an AI expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"At the outbreak of the war between Ukraine and Russia, Russia created deep fakes of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy surrendering," Siskind said.
You can sometimes detect a deepfake if the voice and facial movements seem unnatural, however, online criminals are already working to fix these kinds of imperfections, according to cybersecurity expert Neal O'Farrell, CEO of DropVault, which offers cybersecurity solutions.
"So, if you're looking for those as a way to tell the difference between deepfake and real, you're probably setting a trap for yourself because the bad guys know those are the giveaways. So, they're working very, very hard on fixing those telltales," O'Farrell says.
How can you protect yourself from these scammers? O'Farrell says if you receive a voice or video call from a friend or family member claiming to be in trouble and requesting money or personal information, you need to ask questions.
"Where are you? What jurisdiction are you in? Could I speak to an arresting officer? Could you hold the phone up? Turn on the video and let me see 'proof of life'. Show me that it is you and you are where you say you are," O'Farrell says.
Or choose a unique family code word that hasn't been sent over the internet, and ask the friend or family member to say it. "I'm not continuing this conversation until you give me the code word," O'Farrell explains.
What worries experts is how artificial intelligence learns, and that AI crime is headed toward what's called its "mature phase," which Redbord describes as, "AI systems surpassing human-driven efforts at scale, efficiency, and sophistication. So that's when AI completely removes the human bottleneck and is essentially doing the scam activity, doing the cyber-attacks in a completely automated way."
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently issued an ominous warning about AI accelerating toward Artificial Super Intelligence:
"In the next year or two, this foundation is being locked in, and it's not, we're not going to stop it. And it gets much more interesting after that, because remember, the computers are now doing self-improvement. They're learning how to plan, and they don't have to listen to us anymore."
That means law enforcement and governments will need to utilize AI tools now to fight this crime wave, which experts say could quickly become an epidemic.
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