90% of Cyberattacks Originate With Phishing Emails

Phishing scams targeting corporate executives are reportedly increasing thanks to AI.

Companies like eBay and British insurer Beazley have warned about an uptick in fraudulent emails containing personal details, likely obtained via artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of online profiles, the Financial Times (FT) reported Thursday (Jan. 2).

“This is getting worse and it’s getting very personal, and this is why we suspect AI is behind a lot of it,” Kirsty Kelly, chief information security officer at Beazley, told the FT. “We’re starting to see very targeted attacks that have scraped an immense amount of information about a person.”

According to the report, cyber security experts say these attacks are increasing as AI grows in sophistication. AI bots can quickly consume mass quantities of information about a company’s or person’s style and tone and recreate them to plot an effective scam.

They can also scrape victims’ online and social media presence to find the topics they may be most likely to respond to — helping hackers create large-scale bespoke phishing scams.

“The availability of generative AI tools lowers the entry threshold for advanced cyber crime,” said Nadezda Demidova, a cybercrime security researcher at eBay. “We’ve witnessed a growth in the volume of all kinds of cyber attacks,” particularly in “polished and closely targeted” phishing scams, she added.

AI helped add to a larger cyberattack landscape in 2024, PYMNTS wrote recently, part of a catalogue of threats that include ransomware, zero-day exploits and supply chain attacks.

“It is essentially an adversarial game; criminals are out to make money and the [business] community needs to curtail that activity. What’s different now is that both sides are armed with some really impressive technology,” Michael Shearer, chief solutions officer at Hawk, said in an interview with PYMNTS.

Training and education, PYMNTS wrote, remain crucial components of a robust cybersecurity strategy, as people are often the most vulnerable point in any system. Employees should be updated regularly on the latest phishing tactics and cyber threats, while simulated real-world attack scenarios can help bolster preparedness and resilience.

And while AI can help cybercriminals carry out their schemes, it can also help companies shore up their defenses.

Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The AI MonitorEdge Report: COOs Leverage GenAI to Reduce Data Security Losses” shows that 55% of companies are employing AI-powered cybersecurity measures.

That survey, taken in August of 2024, marked a sharp increase from the 17% of chief operating officers who reported using AI-driven security tools in May.