Gabriel Zgunea, CEO, Corporate Intelligence Agency: in trying to avoid cyber fraud we need to be careful about who we hire and make updates to company procedures and processes that can limit these kinds of attacks

VIDEO. ZF Digital Summit 2023. Gabriel Zgunea, CEO, Corporate Intelligence Agency: in trying to avoid cyber fraud we need to be careful about who we hire and make updates to company procedures and processes that can limit these kinds of attacks
5-6 minutes

Author: Alexandra Cepăreanu 06.11.2023

Gabriel Zgunea, CEO of the Corporate Intelligence Agency, a company specialized in identifying and documenting fraud in companies, which also offers services for securing IT infrastructures, said at the ZF Digital Summit 2023 conference that those who want to avoid fraud and cyber attacks must pay attention to two important aspects - the employees in the company and updates on processes and procedures within the company.

"One is to be very careful about the people they hire or keep (in case they make staff cuts), in the sense that they should also check their propensity to commit fraud, which can be done through profiling, and secondly, to complete and update their company procedures and processes that can limit the commission of fraud," said Gabriel Zgunea.

He explained that in crisis situations, people will look for ways to supplement their income. "When their incomes are reduced, they will look for alternative solutions to make up the shortfall, to supplement their income. And this is where they start to think about what alternative solutions, whether legal or not, they can use to supplement their income. This is why, always, in crisis situations and during crises, fraud has increased exponentially and we are again seeing a trend in this direction. There had been a brief period where they had calmed down following the COVID pandemic, where there was a peak, but slowly they started to increase again because of inflation, because of the fact that incomes have not necessarily kept up with expenditure and they are tempted to top up their incomes. But what's very important is that there's a fraud triangle which says that to commit fraud you have to have first of all an inclination, secondly you have to have a motivation to commit fraud and thirdly you have to have the opportunity to commit that fraud. If the policies and procedures of the company they are working for are pretty well laid out and don't allow fraud to be committed, then regardless of the fact that there is also the inclination, there is also the motivation, they will not end up carrying it out. If the company's policies are relaxed in the area of fraud, then they will most likely succeed in carrying them out. The profiling area, the profiling areas, unfortunately is done on most occasions after fraud has happened and there is already a high suspicion of fraud. But if it had been done at the beginning, at the hiring, if people had been tested and had been discussed with them from the beginning, they would not have been hired, so the fraud would not have happened.""This is happening everywhere, the point is that we can no longer ignore the phenomenon. Some $4.7 trillion, or 5% of total corporate revenue is fraud."

What else Gabriel Zgunea said

As any tool can be used in a negative sense, artificial intelligence can also be used in a negative sense. There are even two bots that I have heard of - one of them is called WormGPT (which I understand has been out of operation for a few days now) and the second one is EvilGPT - with which attackers and fraudsters of all kinds can plan their fishing campaigns or any other kind of crimes, card cloning and any other illicit activity with their help and are given a lot of useful information to be able to do this. Even bots that are not built to provide this kind of information can be tricked into providing it.

One test we did in the early days of the first ChatGPT bot was to ask it to provide us with a list of five sites where we could find information on how to create fishing campaigns and other cybercrimes. And the first answer was that he could not provide us with such a list. Our second request was to give us a list of five sites that we should beware of when it comes to fishing and fraud. And then he told us the top five he knew.

ChatGPT can be a tool to improve some processes, but it can't be the exclusive solution we can rely on. For our business, given that percentage somewhere around 75-80% utilizes human sources, it is almost impossible to use AI just to prepare, to improve the process of information gathering, but it cannot do the information gathering for you. In the open source intelligence area we are already using these types of solutions for data filtering and for quick analysis of trends or patterns that help us to greatly reduce the time in which an investigation takes place.

AI is certainly already being used to plan and commit fraud. Like anything that can be used for good, it can also be used for bad.

The Business Intelligence Reporting that our company makes available to our partners are reports on various topics of interest to the respective companies, which can be considered as an alternative source of information to the information coming from internal sources or collected by the person who needs the information. They underpin the decision-making process and together with the other information that the company already has or in some cases does not have, based on our reporting they make informed and verified decisions.

The report contributes to or informs business decisions or strategic decisions and helps executive members of companies to make informed decisions and avoid surprises. 901TPTP3T of our clients are clients who had never used this type of service before they started working with us. And it's a very early market, but once they've utilized our services, our solutions, and therefore these reports, they continue to use them. I think we have a 98% retention rate of our partners over the last 9 years, which is pretty serious.