GenAI doing the heavy lifting for fraudsters

Praveen Kulkarni, Director-Security, Risk & Governance at OpenText India unpacks the flip side of GenAI—what happens when AI takes a walk in the dark alleys of our business cities. Why is there a FraudGPT and WormGPT after every ChatGPT?

- By Pratima H

How potent and widespread is the abuse of GenAI and LLMs in fraud and scam creation/propagation?

The misuse of generative AI has become deeply concerning. What was once confined to clumsy, easy-to-spot scams has now evolved into highly convincing phishing emails, deepfakes, and automated social engineering at scale. We have seen a notable rise in AI-driven phishing attacks, with 45 per cent of organisations reporting an increase just last year. This is no longer theoretical-it is the daily reality security teams are grappling with. The entry barrier for malefactors has fallen significantly. They no longer require advanced technical expertise; with a prompt and a dash of malice, Generative AI can now perform the heavy lifting on their behalf. That is the essence of the issue-scale and complexity, all powered by AI. In addition to these findings, the 2024 OpenText Cybersecurity Threat Report highlights that 55 per cent of respondents believe their companies are at greater risk of suffering a ransomware attack due to the proliferation of AI usage among threat actors. This underlines the growing concern within the industry regarding Al's role in enhancing cyber threats.

Why do FraudGPT and WormGPT exist? Would we see more such tools?