Managing the Risks of the Future Internet of Things

“It’s low effort for them. Once they set up the subscription and unless the subscription is canceled, they don’t have to do any other work and they can resell access to that subscription,” he said. “So it’s a guaranteed line of profit for them until somebody goes and notices there’s been a problem.”

Criminals typically resell access to the services on secondary markets, McGladrey said. Criminals may resell a streaming service that’s normally $10 per month for $5, netting the thieves $5 monthly. While a single crime is not that profitable, there have been cases where groups have reaped millions of dollars by charging small amounts to hundreds of thousands of consumers, he said.

“Viruses are most commonly spread through phishing, which is a technique of sending emails designed to prey on a person’s emotions to make them click a link or open a malicious attachment,” says Kayne McGladrey IEEE member and director of security and IT for Pensar Development. “Besides running up-to-date commercial antivirus software, the easiest way to avoid viruses is to pause before acting on messages. Get a cup of coffee, or at least get up and stretch, before deciding if the email is trying to manipulate your emotions through a sense of authority (someone impersonating your boss or a police officer), a sense of urgency (because of an artificial time constraint), or scarcity (supplies are limited, act now).” These are the same psychological techniques used by con artists since time immemorial, with the only difference being that con artists had to con one person at a time. “With email, social media, and text messages, threat actors can con thousands of people. No antivirus software is perfect, but pausing before acting can stop most of today’s viruses.”

“You can never get risk to zero, but you can mitigate risk to an acceptable level for that agency or that project,” McGladrey says. “You need to know what risks you can accept and what you have done to mitigate the potential damage associated with those risks.”

Kayne McGladrey, field CISO at Hyperproof, has seen the evidence. He worked with one organization whose executives received a contract for review and signature. “Nearly everything looked right,” McGladrey says. The only noticeable mistake was a minor error in the company’s name, which the chief counsel caught. But Gen AI isn’t just boosting the hackers’ speed and sophistication, it’s also expanding their reach, McGladrey says. Hackers can now use gen AI to create phishing campaigns with believable text in nearly any language, including those that have seen fewer attack attempts to date because the language is hard to learn or rarely spoken by non-native speakers.