Google is Going to War on AI Scams

From Google's Keyword blog: 

We’re filing a lawsuit to dismantle their infrastructure, coordinating with the FBI who will be taking law enforcement actions, and will continue to work with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to block these texts before they reach you. Litigation alone won’t end this. So Google is also advocating for federal legislation to make these protections permanent.

Our civil lawsuit targets an organized cybercrime operation known as the "Outsider Enterprise." Based in China and coordinating through Telegram, this network distributes "phishing kits" that allow criminals to blast out fake text campaigns that look like they’re from Google and other trusted brands.

The scale of the operation is massive:

• Hundreds of thousands of victims have been financially scammed with losses estimated in the millions.
• 9,000 fake websites and over 1 million fraudulent URLs connected to this group.
• 55,000 spam texts were flagged by Android users in just two weeks this past May — that’s more than two text spam complaints a minute.
• 2.5 million messages were sent by the Enterprise to Android users containing links to Outsider-generated websites over this two-week period.

I'm sure some people are probably wondering why safeguards weren't put into place before the floodgates of AI has been opened. Well, the thing about security in the land of technology is that it operates in a reactive system as opposed to a proactive one. Defenders must protect against all possible vulnerabilities, while attackers only need to discover a single unpatched flaw to succeed. This is why many companies, like Google, run their own bounty programs to spot those vulnerabilities before bad actors do. This is why cybersecurity is a pretty solid career to get into. 

Google is laying out how they've begun to fight fire with fire: 

We use AI-powered tools to fight AI-powered scams. This includes scam detection on Android to alert users to suspicious conversations and contacts during calls, and built-in messaging defenses that intercept more than 10 billion malicious messages monthly. By combining powerful security defenses with aggressive legal action, we’re fighting against scammers and working to build a safer internet for everyone.

There's certainly more to be done as I too have to position myself between my own parents and alot of phishing spams, but it's good to see that a larger coelition is taking place.