Stay vigilant amid the rise of AI-powered phishing

AI can write your emails — and also phishing scams 

Ask any generative AI tool to draft a professional email and it will hand you back something polished, personalized, and grammatically flawless in seconds. That's a genuine productivity win, and it's also exactly why phishing emails have quietly gotten a lot harder to spot. The awkward phrasing and typos that used to give a scam away are disappearing, replaced by messages that read like they came from a real colleague.

Thenew phishing looks like you

Attackers no longer need fluent English or hours of research to write a convincing pretext — AI does that work for them, often scraping public information (a LinkedIn title, a department name, a recent announcement) to make the message feel personal. A phishing email referencing your actual job title, your actual supervisor's name, and a plausible reason to act fast isn't a sign you're being paranoid; it's a sign the tools behind it have improved, not that the threat is any less real.

When the voice — or the face — isn't real

The same technology that can clone a writing style can now clone a voice or a face. Deepfake audio and video are increasingly being used to impersonate supervisors and executives in urgent requests for wire transfers, gift cards, or login credentials. If you receive an unusual, high-pressure request — even one that sounds or looks exactly like someone you know — verify it through a second, independent channel before acting: call the person back on a number you already have on file, or walk down the hall and ask in person. Never verify a suspicious request by replying to the same email or calling a number the message itself provided.

If an urgent request feels engineered to make you skip the verification step, that urgency is the tell.

Week of Oct. 5, 2026

This week's BTAA programming digs directly into this shift: “How to Survive the AI Apocalypse” unpacks how AI is reshaping the threat landscape, and the BTAA CISO Panel brings together security leaders from across the Big Ten to talk about what's actually working in response. Both are free, virtual, and open to anyone on campus curious about where this is headed.