Can AI Be Trusted to Stop Phishing?

AI—artificial intelligence—has been a hot topic as of late, with it seemingly being used for any purpose you can imagine nowadays. Unfortunately, this has also included cybercrime.

However, just as AI can be a weapon for cybercriminals to use, it can also be a shield to help protect your business from threats. For instance, in phishing prevention.

Let’s talk about how AI is now being trained as a means of stopping more phishing attacks from darkening the doors of your email inboxes.

What is AI, and How Can It Help Stop Phishing?

AI is just a very, very complicated computer program that collects data and parses it to make predictions, improving its predictions over time based on previous errors. Not only can it go through this process much faster than a human being, it can also do so more objectively and without the human error that a user is inherently prone to.

This makes AI an excellent candidate for identifying and mitigating attacks like phishing. Let’s go over the four ways that it does so.

1. AI can dig deeper into an email to spot signs of phishing. While it is still critical that you and your team are able to catch the surface-level signs of phishing, a system that puts AI to work can take a much deeper look at an email to identify attacks that are more effectively hidden—like if a message has needed to jump between too many IP address before arriving to the inbox, for instance.
2. AI can detect atypical behavior based on a message’s contents. As time passes, you’ll receive more and more messages. An AI-powered security system can analyze your existing messages to identify patterns in how different contacts tend to communicate, helping spot behavior that is out of the norm.
3. AI can also detect atypical behaviors based on a message’s context. Similarly, an AI-powered system can pull from past messages to spot other areas of concern in those that are incoming. These are largely the same ones that you and your team will be spotting, AI can just spot it before you ever receive the message.
4. AI can take organizational patterns into account. By augmenting your email with AI-based protections, the system can actually spot any incongruous or otherwise suspicious interactions between users, acknowledging if an intern or entry-level employee is speaking oddly to a C-level business leader.

Does This Mean Your Team Can Relax About Their Phishing Awareness?

Absolutely not.

 Not only does phishing spread through more means than just email, presenting itself in effectively every form of communication, these AI platforms are not perfect at spotting such attempts. Your team needs to be able to spot it regardless, if only as a final stopgap between a threat and your business’ assets.

Directive is here to help you secure your business as well. Learn more about our assortment of cybersecurity services and solutions by calling 607.433.2200.