Do not become a victim to these new attacks — what to know.
The news that AI is being used to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and place calls to foreign ministers may be shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. The FBI has warned such attacks are now taking place, and it will only get worse.
As first reported by the , the State Department has warned U.S. diplomats that this latest attack has been caught in the act, with at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor amongst those contacted.
A fake Signal account (Signal strikes again) was used to instigate contact though text and voice messages. It’s clear that voice messages enable AI fakes to be deployed without the inherent risk in attempting to run this in real-time on a live call.
Darktrace’s AI and Strategy director Margaret Cunningham told me this is all too “easy.” The attacks, while “ultimately unsuccessful,” demonstrate “just how easily generative AI can be used to launch credible, targeted social engineering attacks.”
Alarmingly, Cunningham warns, “this threat didn’t fail because it was poorly crafted — it failed because it missed the right moment of human vulnerability.
