Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
A study has found that AI chatbots can be more effective at social engineering than human scammers, WIRED reports. The researchers looked at a form of romance scam commonly known as “pig butchering,” in which scammers spend weeks or months building a relationship with the victim before tricking them into sending money for a phony investment scheme.
“[The researchers] found that for the relationship-establishing stages of the scam—the stage that in real-world scams typically represents the longest part of the interactions with the victim, often stretching to months—an AI chatbot performed remarkably effectively, successfully impersonating a human and by some measures outperforming the real human ‘scammers’ in their experiment,” WIRED says.
Since the majority of the scam consists of non-malicious conversations, the researchers found that even legitimate AI chatbots could be used to automate the trust-building stage. Once the scammer is ready to ask for money, a human operator takes over.
Yisroel Mirsky, a computer science professor at Ben Gurion University who led the research, stated, “By having the full first stage of the scam performed automatically with LLMs at scale, you bring the victim up to this point where they have a very high level of trust. Then by transitioning it over to the human scammer at the end, this completely bypasses any vendor safeguards. With relatively little effort, we’re able to make an agent that can outperform a human at building this exploitable emotional trust.”
Notably, when the participants in the study were informed that one of the conversations they were having was with an AI chatbot, nearly all of them were able to identify which conversation it was. Before they were told, however, only one participant suspected that they were talking to an AI. One of the researchers, Gilad Gressel, noted, “That’s exactly how scams are, actually. Once the scam victim realizes what’s going on, it’s obvious. But when you’re in the illusion of it, you just don’t see it.
AI-native security awareness training can give your employees a healthy sense of suspicion so they can avoid falling for social engineering attacks. KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 70,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 Platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.
WIRED has the story: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-scammers-are-better-at-building-trust-than-humans/
Topics: Social Engineering Phishing Security Awareness Training Human Risk Management AI Business Email Compromise Scams
See how you can efficiently safeguard your organization from sophisticated social engineering threats.
KnowBe4 empowers the modern workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Trusted by more than 70,000 organizations worldwide, KnowBe4 is the pioneer of digital workforce security, securing both AI agents and humans. The KnowBe4 Platform provides attack simulation and training, collaboration security, and agent security powered by AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents) and a proprietary Risk Score. The platform leverages 15 years of behavioral data to combat advanced threats including social engineering, prompt injection, and shadow AI. By securing humans and agents, KnowBe4 leads the industry in workforce trust and defense.
The KnowBe4 Team delivers timely, expert-driven insights on cybersecurity trends, emerging threat intelligence, human risk and agent security best practices, compliance strategies and industry research to help organizations strengthen their digital defense layer and stay informed, resilient, and secure.
Subscribe the KnowBe4 Blog
