A new threat has emerged, AI scam calls. These are phone calls from scammers using artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of someone you know. Last month, the FTC issued an alert about scammers using the voice of loved ones to trick you into sending money or buying gift cards and sending those to them. Now imagine picking up the phone at work and hearing your boss calling and asking you to wire them some cash, but it isn’t really your boss!
How this works
Similar to business email compromise attacks which take the email address of your boss or business owner, this attack takes a voice, someone you know. This potentially could be your boss or the business owner. The scammer then creates an AI generated voice to place the call. They do this by obtaining a voice recording of the person they will mimic.
Business Communication Compromises
This is an umbrella term to describe the numerous ways cybercriminals send legitimate looking communications to a business. These attacks include emails (business email compromise), instant messaging hijack, phone calls, text messages, and any other way your business communicates.
The risk to your business
Like business email compromise, these attacks can easily trick your employee into either revealing private information, like user accounts, clients, or financial information. These attacks can also quickly hit your pocketbook if the employee falls victim and transfers money or makes purchases. Since a lot of these AI scam calls originate with spoofed numbers and come from all over the world, it is hard to recover any lost assets.
What you can do
Just like with business email compromise attacks, the best course of action you can take is to verify if the caller is who they really are. You can do this by asking them questions only that person would know or by hanging up and calling them back at a verified phone number. Like all social engineering attacks, the AI scam calls will be here to stay. This means you will need to train your employees on a process of what to do in incidents when they occur. To learn more about current cyber threats to your small business, steps you can take to protect your business, or to learn more on cybersecurity, check out Small Business, Big Threat!