Cybersecurity company Abnormal Security Corp. today announced a new service specifically designed to detect artificial intelligence-generated email attacks.

The new service, called “CheckGPT,” determines when email threats, including business email compromise and other socially engineered attacks, have likely been created using generative AI tools.

Abnormal Security argues that cybercriminals are harnessing the power of generative AI, such as ChatGPT or its malicious counterpart, WormGPT, to craft compelling emails that evade traditional security measures. In a recent research report, Abnormal observed a 55% increase in BEC attacks over the previous six months — with the potential for volumes to increase exponentially as generative AI becomes more widely adopted.

The new service differs from traditional email security solutions, taking a “radically different approach” to stopping advanced email attacks. Under the hood, Abnormal’s application programming interface architecture ingests thousands of diverse signals to build a baseline of the known-good behavior of every employee and vendor in an organization based on communication patterns, sign-in events and thousands of other attributes. It then applies advanced AI models, including natural language processing, to detect abnormalities in email behavior that indicate a potential attack.

After initial email processing, the Abnormal platform further expands upon its classification of emails by processing email attacks to understand their intent and origin. The CheckGPT tool leverages a suite of open-source large language models to analyze how likely it is that a generative AI model created the message. It analyzes the likelihood that each word in the message has been generated by an AI model, given the context that precedes it.

If the likelihood is consistently high, it’s a strong potential indicator that AI generated the text. The system then combines this indicator with a range of AI detectors to make a final determination on whether an attack was likely to be generated by AI.

“Security leaders need to combat the threat of AI by investing in AI-powered security solutions that ingest thousands of signals to learn their organization’s unique user behavior, apply advanced models to precisely detect anomalies and then block attacks before they reach employees,” Chief Executive Evan Reiser said ahead of the announcement. “While it’s important to understand whether an email was generated by a human or AI to understand and stay ahead of evolving threats, the right system will detect and block attacks no matter how they were created.”

Abnormal Security was last in the news in March when it announced a new partnership with CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., including an investment from the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund LP.

Image: Abnormal Security