Email has been seen as a prime tool for many cyber criminals because of its ability to reach a vast amount of users. Statistics show that email use has expanded with the rise of the smartphone, with over 5 billion email users in the world and about 281 billion emails are sent each and every day.
Keeping these messages and accounts safe has become big business.
Many organizations and experts have been hoping that artificial intelligence (AI) will have the capability to make emails more secure in the future, including Vancouver’s Thierry Levasseur who notes that scammers can use sophisticated methods to gain access to user’s data.
Fishing out phishing messages
One of the ways that AI is beneficial is by rooting out phishing emails. Phishing has been one of the most successful ways that cybercriminals have used against targets. It involves sending emails that appear to be from a legitimate business in an effort to solicit personal information from someone. Most of the times they attempt to get the email recipient to give away passwords, credit card information or other similar information. No one is immune to these attacks, not even large corporations like Google and Facebook. Both of the digital giants have lost money to phishing scams.
With AI, these types of emails can come with a warning to the individual that it may be a scam.
Google leads the way
There are plans to get AI to filter out potentially malicious emails, similar to how GMail diverts spam mail into its own folder and the user does not even notice.
In fact, Google claims that its gmail detection model can filter out 99.9 percent of spam or phishing emails. The company boosts such success have been based on machine learning developments. For larger companies, they have been able to protect against data breaches by alerting email users they are sending information to external addresses.
“In this type of a system, emails are analyzed by AI, which in turn is fueled by algorithms to detect changes or unusual elements of a message,” Thierry Levasseur explained.
Power of machine learning
Machine learning, or the ability for AI to become more powerful as it tracks users’ patterns, is one of the most powerful weapons IT techs have to combat cyber attacks. AI’s capability to secure email accounts gets better with time, which makes it an economical investment for any business. While most email security software is limited in its future ability to block out bad messages, AI’s abilities to filter actually increase as it “learns” more. It can adjust to new cyber crime methods and users can input additional malicious links, addresses, text and more as they become aware of new attack techniques.
Staying safe
As AI technology continues to advance there will undoubtedly be new ways to keep email accounts safe and secure. For now, innovation has been leading the way for most businesses and companies looking to protect their employees and data.
