Cybercrime of all types is exploding, thanks to GenAI. According to digital security firm Onfido, 2023 saw a 3,000% increase in the incidence of so-called deepfake fraud, an explosion triggered and made possible by the breakthroughs in generative AI.
getty
Two years ago, we published a piece entitled “What to do about supply chain crime.” The occasion was a pandemic-era resurgence of a problem from the days of pirates, highwaymen, and train robbers: the physical theft of in-transit goods and materials. Criminals were becoming more brazen and inventive in their methods, we reported, but businesses and law enforcement had new tools that could, if properly applied, at least give businesses a fighting chance to roll back the tide of supply chain fraud and theft. We concluded on an upbeat note, adding as a cautionary aside that “there is increasing concern about cyber threats to the supply chain.”
What we didn’t see back then was how quickly generative AI (GenAI) would evolve and springboard into widespread use. In fact, GenAI has so far been of vastly more use to cybercriminals than to the people trying to stop them.
Cybercrime of all types is exploding, thanks to GenAI. According to digital security firm Onfido, 2023 saw a 3,000% increase in the incidence of so-called deepfake fraud, an explosion triggered and made possible by the breakthroughs in generative AI that grabbed headlines and public attention throughout the second half of 2022.
And while you might think this would have taken some of the pressure off supply chain managers—whose responsibility is, after all, the flow of physical products and commodities through the three-dimensional world—the opposite has happened. GenAI has given supply chain managers more to worry about than ever, including previously unimaginable threats to the physical movement of supplies.
Take, for example, the proliferation of invoice fraud, the blanket term for a range of scams that involve the creation and submission of fake statements of charges.
Are we still upbeat about the future of supply chain security? Yes. But the threats are continually changing and keeping pace with the bad guys requires more than new tools and strategies, though those are essential. It also requires old tools and strategies, such as tuning existing machine learning (ML) systems to detect fake invoices and insider fraud. It also means reinforcing traditional cybersecurity practices and collaborating with suppliers.
To read the rest of this article, visit “Supply chain crime and the AI arms race.”