AI will make scam emails look genuine, UK cybersecurity agency warns

Artificial intelligence will make it difficult to spot whether emails are genuine or sent by scammers and malicious actors, including messages that ask computer users to reset their passwords, the UK's cybersecurity agency has warned. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said people would struggle to identify phishing messages – where users are tricked into handing over passwords or personal details – due to the sophistication of AI tools. Generative AI, the term for technology that can produce convincing text, voice and images from simple hand-typed prompts, has become widely available to the public through chatbots such as ChatGPT and free-to-use versions known as open source models. The NCSC, part of the GCHQ spy agency, said in its latest assessment of AI's impact on the cyber threats facing the UK that AI would "almost certainly" increase the volume of cyber-attacks and heighten their impact over the next two years. It said generative AI and large language models – the technology that underpins chatbots – will complicate efforts to identify different types of attack such as spoof messages and social engineering, the term for manipulating people to hand over confidential material.