Abnormal Announces New Capability to Detect AI-Generated Email Attacks 

Abnormal Security, the leading behavioral AI-based email security platform, today announced CheckGPT, used to detect AI-generated attacks. The new capability determines when email threats, including business email compromise (BEC) and other socially-engineered attacks, have likely been created using generative AI tools.  

Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their attack tactics to evade detection by security defenses, and generative AI is the newest weapon in their arsenal. Using tools like ChatGPT or its malicious cousin WormGPT, threat actors can now write increasingly convincing emails, scaling their attacks in both volume and sophistication. In its latest research report, Abnormal observed a 55% increase in BEC attacks over the previous six months—with the potential for volumes to increase exponentially as generative AI becomes more widely adopted. 

Unlike traditional email security solutions, Abnormal takes a radically different approach to stopping advanced email attacks, making it particularly well-suited to the challenge of blocking AI-generated attacks. The unique API architecture ingests thousands of diverse signals to build a baseline of the known-good behavior of every employee and vendor in an organization based on communication patterns, sign-in events and thousands of other attributes. It then applies advanced AI models including natural language processing (NLP) to detect abnormalities in email behavior that indicate a potential attack.

After initial email processing, the Abnormal platform expands upon this classification by further processing email attacks to understand their intent and origin. The CheckGPT tool leverages a suite of open source large language models (LLMs) to analyze how likely it is that a generative AI model created the message. The system first analyzes the likelihood that each word in the message has been generated by an AI model, given the context that precedes it. If the likelihood is consistently high, it’s a strong potential indicator that text was generated by AI. 

The system then combines this indicator with an ensemble of AI detectors to make a final determination on whether an attack was likely to be generated by AI. As a result of this new detection capability, Abnormal recently released research showing a number of emails that contained language strongly suspected to be AI-generated, including business email compromise and credential phishing attacks.  

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