Jay Chaudhry, founder of the $30 billion cybersecurity company Zscaler, is keenly aware of the growing risks posed by artificial intelligence deep fakes. This awareness hit home when a scammer used Chaudhry’s voice to deceive one of his employees.
“Someone mimicked my voice and called one of our salespeople, saying, ‘This is Jay calling,’” Chaudhry recounted during a trip to Sydney in an interview with Capital Brief. The scammer quickly hung up and followed up with a text message: “Hey, I’m in a bad zone, I can’t talk… please buy 10 of these gift certificates.”
Believing the request came from his CEO, the employee spent $1,500 on gift cards. Chaudhry, while able to laugh it off, acknowledged the situation could have been far worse and expressed concern for the future.
“We need to be paranoid about it,” said Chaudhry, who was in Australia to promote Zscaler’s integration into Google Chrome Enterprise and a partnership with Nvidia. This partnership leverages generative AI to analyze company data, highlighting potential threats and breach points.
Generative AI has significantly impacted the cybersecurity threat landscape over the past two years. While chatbots generating malicious code is not a new phenomenon — malware has been readily available on internet forums for over a decade — AI is now enhancing scammers’ social engineering capabilities, making their schemes more convincing and dangerous.