Be careful what you wish for. A loose-knit community of con artists known as Yahoo Boys has begun using real-time face-swap technology to woo victims with romance scams. Using a variety of tools and techniques, the scammers use AI-powered apps to make themselves look like entirely different people on video calls. Just remember: If someone you've never met IRL is asking you for money, just say no. Elsewhere in the world of harmful deepfakes, two major websites used for creating fake nude images of people are now blocked in the United Kingdom.

Artificial intelligence has been described as a'general purpose technology'. This means that, like electricity, computers and the internet before it, AI is expected to have applications in every corner of society. Unfortunately for organisations seeking to keep their IT secure, this includes cybercrime. In 2020, a study by European police agency Europol and security provider Trend Micro, identified how cybercriminals are already using AI to make their attacks more effective, and the many ways AI will power cybercrime in future. "Cybercriminals have always been early adopters of the latest technology and AI is no different," said Martin Roesler, head of forward-looking threat research at Trend Micro, when the report was published. "It is already being used for password guessing, CAPTCHA-breaking and voice cloning, and there are many more malicious innovations in the works."

The EU's police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc's data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a "big data ark" containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime. According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol's cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress. Data protection advocates say the volume of information held on Europol's systems amounts to mass surveillance and is a step on its road to becoming a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the organisation whose clandestine online spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"Has anyone witnessed any examples of criminals abusing artificial intelligence?" That's a question security firms have been raising in recent years. But a new public/private report into AI and ML identifies likely ways in which such attacks might occur - and offers examples of threats already emerging. The most likely criminal use cases will involve "AI as a service" offerings, as well as AI enabled or supported offerings, as part of the wider cybercrime-as-a-service ecosystem. That's according to the EU's law enforcement intelligence agency, Europol, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute - UNICRI - and Tokyo-based security firm Trend Micro, which prepared the joint report: "Malicious Uses and Abuses of Artificial Intelligence".

This article is part of "The age of surveillance," a special report on artificial intelligence. Lawmakers are still figuring out how best to use artificial intelligence. Lawbreakers are doing the same. The malicious use of artificial intelligence is growing. Officials are warning against attacks that use deepfake technology, AI-enhanced "phishing" campaigns and software that guesses passwords based on big data analysis.

The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) developed software to help Dutch police filter life-threatening messages sent by suspected criminals using the encrypted EncroChat phone network. After placing a "software implant" on an EncroChat server in Roubaix, French investigators began collecting live data from phones on 1 April 2020, which they then shared with Dutch police through a secure computer link. With the infiltration of the network leading to the interception of at least 25 million messages, Dutch police wanted a way of predicting which messages contained serious threats to life so they could take action. To do this, the NFI's forensic big data analysis (FBDA) team modified a computer model it had previously developed in late 2019 to scan for drug-related messages sent between suspected criminals in large volumes of communications data, as part of a research and development project. EncroChat, which had 60,000 users worldwide and around 9,000 users in the UK (see distribution map below), was used by organised crime groups for drug dealing, money laundering and plotting to kill rival criminals.

The 24 March, 2020 will be remembered by some for the news that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid and was isolating in Scotland. In Athens it was memorable as the day the traffic went silent. Twenty-four hours into a hard lockdown, Greeks were acclimatising to a new reality in which they had to send an SMS to the government in order to leave the house. As well as millions of text messages, the Greek government faced extraordinary dilemmas. The European Union's most vulnerable economy, its oldest population along with Italy, and one of its weakest health systems faced the first wave of a pandemic that overwhelmed richer countries with fewer pensioners and stronger health provision. One Greek who did go into the office that day was Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the minister for digital transformation, whose signature was inked in blue on an agreement with the US technology company, Palantir. The deal, which would not be revealed to the public for another nine months, gave one of the world's most controversial tech companies access to vast amounts of personal data while offering its software to help Greece weather the Covid storm. The zero-cost agreement was not registered on the public procurement system, neither did the Greek government carry out a data impact assessment – the mandated check to see whether an agreement might violate privacy laws. The questions that emerge in pandemic Greece echo those from across Europe during Covid and show Palantir extending into sectors from health to policing, aviation to commerce and even academia.

A jointly developed new report by Europol, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and Trend Micro looking into current and predicted criminal uses of artificial intelligence (AI) was released today. The report provides law enforcers, policymakers and other organisations with information on existing and potential attacks leveraging AI and recommendations on how to mitigate these risks. "AI promises the world greater efficiency, automation and autonomy. At a time where the public is getting increasingly concerned about the possible misuse of AI, we have to be transparent about the threats, but also look into the potential benefits from AI technology." said Edvardas Šileris, Head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre. "This report will help us not only to anticipate possible malicious uses and abuses of AI, but also to prevent and mitigate those threats proactively. This is how we can unlock the potential AI holds and benefit from the positive use of AI systems."

Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 5G and the rise of the Internet of Things are just some of the emerging technologies that could aid cybercriminals in ways that could make them more dangerous than ever – and law enforcement must innovate quickly in order to help keep citizens safe, a new report has warned. IBM launches its Watson for Cyber Security beta program to test how cognitive computing can boost cybersecurity. Published by Europol, the'Do criminals dream of electric sheep: how technology shapes the future of crime and law enforcement' report – the title of which references the work of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick – explores the consequences that emerging technology could have for cybercrime. It's also suggested that law enforcement itself could take advantage of some of the emerging technologies to help in the fight against cybercrime. For example, AI is detailed as a technology that could benefit law enforcement by helping to improve the security of systems and devices.

One of the world's biggest networks of hijacked computers has been dismantled after a four-year investigation, the EU law enforcement agency Europol says. The Avalanche network was used to target online bank customers with phishing and spam emails, it adds. More than a million emails were sent per week with malicious files or links. When users opened them, their infected computers became part of the network. Five people have been arrested, but Europol has not said where.