By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Generative AI technology is providing all kinds of great new opportunities and is no doubt transformative to businesses – but it’s also ushering in a new Golden Age for scammers. Deep fakes are now easy to produce and can be virtually impossible to recognise for the unsuspecting user. The right DNS filtering service is an excellent way to protect yourself, your company, and your customers from the vast majority of security attacks including AI-generated phishing scams, DNSFilter says.
In one of the most spectacular financial phishing scams ever an employee ended up paying out US$25 million to fraudsters after a deep-fake video call, CNN reported earlier this year. The scam began with a phishing email and could probably have been avoided had a DNS filtering solution been in place. Frauds of this degree of sophistication are still not common but generative AI is definitely a gold mine for scammers, which means a strong focus on Wi-Fi security is becoming increasingly critical, says DNSFilter.
“We know that the number of phishing emails has increased massively over the past years – by hundreds of percent – and that more than 90% of cyber attacks start with a phishing email. Now there’s the additional dimension of AI creating excellent copies of emails and websites, even imitating a persons voice, writing style, and so on. It can be extremely hard to tell fake from real emails, sometimes it’s impossible. It’s a huge problem and a big threat,” says Mikey Pruitt, MSP Evangelist at DNSFilter.
Email services company Mailgun says AI-generated phishing raked in US$2 billion in 2022 alone using dark web services like WormGPT or FraudGPT for example to personalise scams and create carefully replicated phishing emails. AI can also be used to automate and scale increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks, Mailgun says. The company says 3.4 billion emails are sent every day by cyber criminals.
“DNS filtering is not a 100% security solution because vulnerabilities can exist on many layers of the stack. On the other hand, it is true that so much fraud starts with a phishing attack and that’s why it’s really a no-brainer to incorporate DNS filtering into your Wi-Fi service. Otherwise, you’re asking guests or staff using your Wi-Fi service to be aware of these things, and that is becoming increasingly difficult,”
He also says that generative AI can do a lot of damage but can’t change the fact that DNS resolution is required for the scam to work, and by far most fraudulent domains are known or can be quickly suspected of being fraudulent.”We train and apply our own AI-based algorithms to look for and identify malicious sites that haven’t been reported before,” he says.
That said DNS filtering is not only a simple way to boost cybersecurity but also an easy way to incorporate web policies into your Wi-Fi service. “It is easy to set up policies to block for example social media, gambling, or adult content sites from your guest Wi-Fi services. And it is super easy to apply different policies to different VLANs,” he says (also see the graphic below).
Resolution performance is key
Add to this DNSFilter resolves DNS queries extremely quickly. “Everyone is concerned about performance, and for good reason. Most of the time, DNSFilter just needs to be a fast DNS resolver. Our sophisticated threat categorisation techniques only come into play on a small percentage of DNS queries. So fast is a priority and in fact, we operate the highest-performing DNS resolution service in the world on most days. It will normally be substantially faster than current DNS service,” he says.
“It used to be that MSPs and other clients were concerned about performance but the truth is that today, we have perhaps the highest-performing DNS resolution service in the world, or close to it. It will normally be substantially faster than standard DNS services,” Mikey Pruitt says.
DNSFilter has categorised more than one billion domains and the company adds a million new domains per day. More than 130 billion domain queries are processed every day by DNSFilter, equivalent to 1% of the world’s Internet traffic. For more about DNS performance read here.
/Claus.
