AI-generated phishing emails are getting very good at targeting executives

That’s ok, with how much more they’re paid than everyone else I’m sure they’re all far too clever to be fooled - corporations are the epitome of a meritocracy don’t you know?

You know who else is good at targeting executives?

Story Time: It's 2003 and I'm working at a local television station in buttfuck nowhere Louisiana as a Production Assistant.

We had just recovered from a massive disaster that had taken out tons of our equipment because somehow, the radio tower next to the building had never been properly grounded and so since it's the tallest structure in the area by far, when it finally got hit by lightning we got fucked.

Anyway, just back on our feet when a computer virus wrecks more than half the systems in the building.

We would eventually find out that it was the manager who ran the station, the local Big Boss, the guy who answered to corporate (I don't recall his actual title, just that he was the top dog at the station). He clicked on one of those bullshit emails, downloaded and ran the attachment. This was 2003 mind you, when those type of attacks were even less sophisticated.

Literally, no punishment for him at all despite making everyone's jobs harder for weeks on end. These people are fucking easily manipulated and we do nothing to punish them when they fuck up.

Finally, why wouldn't they target executives? They have a history of acting like rules about security don't apply to them because they're inconvenient, and they have the biggest pocketbooks to rob and the most control at their corporations. They are literally the most lucrative target you could choose. Getting the keys to their user account could be more useful than getting an IT admins account, depending on how foolhardy the executive is.

CEO at my last company refused any security access he didn't strictly require. He'd just laugh, "Yeah, no, don't even want that."

In my IT experience, it's the department heads, or people an outsider thinks is important, that get spear phished. Job before last, the HR woman got overrun with attacks. LOL, she was the most useless, clueless person in the company but she sounded important on paper. Director of Human Resources. She had two people under her in a 35 employee outfit.

Quick, somebody write emails to health insurance ceos to trick them to approve all claims!

Let me fix that headline : "In 2025 : Executives still don't care about computing, and even less about cybersecurity"

perhaps executives are more replaceable by AI than workers are?

I've just realized that automated cons is something these things are absolutely best for.

Aggregator websites full of absolute junk - too bad, falling back to asking friends or, well, finding new ones via links in you feed in some social network. Search engines full of absolute junk - still kinda work for me, but ultimately the same.

Political fakes and political bots - well, mass propaganda was always there, it even found ways to appear grassroots, by having different layers of propaganda for different layers of society, designed smart enough so that people would make derivative ideas which would seem natural for their own layer and sincerely think other layers are independent from it.

The whole of USSR's society - both the dumbest types, the average workers, the lower layer of educated people (schoolteachers, techs, officers etc), the intelligentsia, the "masters of life" in all their gradations from party nomenclature of various levels to diplomats and journalists, all of them, - was in fact product of such propaganda. Soviet dissidents being no exception. The gray silent cowardly dishonest types from party nomenclature turned out to have far better understanding. Still the system into which they've rebuilt USSR and its society can't last for long. Right now it's in process of killing Russia's and Ukraine's best people in a war. Those grey types may think they are killing two birds with one stone, but it won't be too long until they realize what Assad did recently.

Interestingly enough, I think it was really intended to be so somewhere in 1920s when it was started. If you read Soviet "conformist" sci-fi, it would appear that in Soviet marxism "redoing" the continuous and chaotic fabric of society into a set of uniform classes, or layers, was considered as something good. Can't say anything about logic of that, but the emotional component was something about self-organizing systems and humanity building itself towards some ascension via science, order, centralized administration and planning of everything. I definitely know that they (people in charge of that ideology) were huge fans of Plato's Republic. If we suggest that Soviet propaganda was literally aimed at implementing that, then the "philosopher class" would be whom I called "masters of life", the military and engineers, including that intelligentsia which mostly had technical education, would be the "soldier class" by Plato, and everyone else the workers.

OK, that's off topic. What I meant is that such propaganda will become even stronger, but it was already strong enough without burning a lot of electricity. LLMs won't make a revolution there, because in deceiving its own humanity has progressed past the need in LLMs long before LLMs.

But automated cons are something else. Scammers had to waste a lot of time to get a successful scam. Now they can use "AI" voice bots with sufficiently individual approach.

emails

Look; If you can't spell the word, I'm not going to assume you're an expert in it.