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New research by Gartner suggests AI agents will be a vital tool for account takeover attacks by 2025.
Analysts at research firm Gartner have suggested that the rise of agentic AI could lead to a boom in cyber crime via account takeovers by 2027.
By that time, AI agents could reduce the time it takes to exploit account exposures by at least 50 per cent.
Agentic AI could assist malicious actors by automating many steps of the account takeover process, from creating deepfake voice profiles for social engineering to automating the entire credential abuse attack chain.
“Account takeover remains a persistent attack vector because weak authentication credentials, such as passwords, are gathered by a variety of means, including data breaches, phishing, social engineering and malware,” Jeremy D’Hoinne, VP analyst at Gartner, said in a statement.
“Attackers then leverage bots to automate a barrage of login attempts across a variety of services in the hope that the credentials have been reused on multiple platforms.”
Gartner is also expecting executives to increasingly be targeted by technology-enabled social engineering. By 2028, Gartner predicts 40 per cent of all social engineering attacks will target executives.
“Organisations will have to stay abreast of the market and adapt procedures and workflows in an attempt to better resist attacks leveraging counterfeit reality techniques,” Manuel Acosta, senior director analyst at Gartner, said.
“Educating employees about the evolving threat landscape by using training specific to social engineering with deepfakes is a key step.”
According to Akif Khan, VP analyst at Gartner, one of the best ways to combat such attacks is passwordless phishing-resistant multifactor authentication.
Khan said it would be the responsibility of security leaders to “educate and incentivise users to migrate from passwords to multidevice passkeys where appropriate”.
You can read the full Predicts 2025: Navigating Imminent AI Turbulence for Cybersecurity report here.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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