We’ve noticed a surge in highly personalized phishing emails that don't have the typical "red flags" like typos or bad grammar. These seem to be generated by LLMs to mimic our executives perfectly. How can our SOC team adapt our email security filters and employee training to catch these sophisticated, AI-driven social engineering attempts?
3 answers
You should look into Behavioral AI tools for your email gateway. They are designed to spot the subtle linguistic shifts that indicate a message might be generated by an LLM or a bot.
The rise of AI-driven phishing means we can no longer rely on users spotting "bad English." You need to implement AI-based email security solutions that analyze communication patterns and "intent" rather than just looking for malicious links or signatures. These tools look for anomalies in how people usually talk to each other. Additionally, update your training to emphasize "out-of-band" verification. If an executive asks for something unusual, the employee should confirm it via a different channel like a quick phone call or a verified internal chat message before taking action.
Are you seeing these attacks coming from compromised internal accounts or external spoofed domains? The defense strategy changes quite a bit depending on whether it is an Account Takeover or just a very clever external spoof.
Christopher, it's mostly external spoofing so far. For that, you really need to ensure your DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records are strictly enforced. Also, consider adding a visual tag for all external emails that clearly identifies them as coming from outside the organization to give your staff a persistent heads-up.
Spot on, Amanda. Behavioral analysis is the only way to scale defenses against these automated threats since traditional signature-based detection is becoming obsolete.