AI abuses threaten financial institutions- misinformation campaigns must be stopped

TLDR:

• Financial institutions are facing threats from AI abuse and misinformation campaigns.
• Cybercriminals are exploiting generative AI for data exfiltration and phishing attacks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) abuse and misinformation campaigns are posing significant threats to financial institutions, according to experts. While generative AI offers many benefits to financial firms, cybercriminals are finding ways to exploit it for malicious purposes, such as data exfiltration and creating convincing phishing lures at scale. This misuse of AI can lead to severe legal, reputational, and operational consequences for financial institutions. Moreover, the use of biased or privileged information in large language models (LLMs) that train AI can result in a loss of trust from regulators, consumers, and investors.

Threat actors are expected to launch misinformation campaigns and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against critical infrastructure, taking advantage of geopolitical tensions and upcoming elections. The financial services sector also faces challenges from zero-day vulnerabilities in the supply chain, with attacks disrupting various systems like clearing, trading, and back-office services. To combat these threats, companies must prioritize proactive cyber hygiene and work closely with suppliers to enhance their cybersecurity posture.