Jay Chaudhry, founder of US$30 billion ($44.4 billion) cybersecurity company Zscaler, is acutely aware of the growing risks posed by artificial intelligence deep fakes. After all, a scammer used Chaudhry’s voice to scam one of his own employees.
“There was a situation where somebody in my voice called one of our salespeople and said, ‘this is Jay calling’,” Chaudhry told Capital Brief during a trip to Sydney. The scammer quickly hung up and sent a text message saying: “Hey, I’m in a bad zone, I can’t talk… please buy 10 of these gift certificates.”
The hapless subordinate, convinced the CEO of his company was making the request, ended up spending US$1,500 on gift cards. Chaudhry laughed about it, because it could have been much worse. And he’s expecting that it will get much worse.
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“We need to be paranoid about it,” said Chaudhry, who was in Australia to promote Zscaler’s integration into Google Chrome Enterprise and a partnership with Nvidia that uses generative AI that analyses company data and can highlight threats and breach points.
Generative AI has been changing the cybersecurity threat landscape over the past two years. That’s not because chatbots can generate malign code — malware has been cheaply or freely available on internet forums for the past decade — but rather that artificial intelligence is improving scammers’ social engineering abilities.