Office of Information Technology
May 19, 2023
Tags Phishing Email (on campus)

Beware AI-Enhanced Phishing Attempts

Phish Bowl Alerts

Recent phishing reports indicate that AI is being used to generate more targeted phishing attempts, such as pulling together resources and references tied to a faculty member's area of research, as inroads to catching attention and a hoped-for response. Fortunately, and like so much of phishing, the content fails the "closer inspection" test.

While these emails attempt to suggest a certain familiarity with the recipient's work, these suffer from some of the same things typical for much of phishing: a general lack of coherence, no specifics about the sender, and a meandering but confusion collection of information. 

If you receive a suspicious email, we recommend alerting us at phishbowl@brown.edu, then marking it as phishing (open the message in a browser, click on the stack of three dots to the right of the REPLY button and select "Report phishing").

For further reading, here are three recent articles on the subject: