From The Washington Post
AI, huge hacks leave consumers facing a perfect storm of privacy perils
By Joseph Menn
Hackers are using artificial intelligence to mine unprecedented troves of personal information dumped online in the past year, along with unregulated commercial databases, to trick American consumers and even sophisticated professionals into giving up control of bank and corporate accounts.
Armed with sensitive health information, calling records and hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers, criminals and operatives of countries hostile to the United States are crafting emails, voice calls and texts that purport to come from government officials, co-workers or relatives needing help, or familiar financial organizations trying to protect accounts instead of draining them.
“There is so much data out there that can be used for phishing and password resets that it has reduced overall security for everyone, and artificial intelligence has made it much easier to weaponize,” said Ashkan Soltani, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, the only such state-level agency...
Ashkan Soltani (MIMS 2009) has previously served a brief stint as a Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and as the Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.
