How AI is Changing Cybercrime (and Why Contractors Need to Pay Attention)

is part two on AI and cybercrime and what's going on today in the construction world.

I think last time I told the story about Spirit Airlines being in bankruptcy and there were people bidding on the data from it.

Google won the bid at $10 million for their data.

It hasn't actually been purchased yet, but the point is that your company's information is worth money.

And we talked about protecting some of that last time, but contractors think about, okay, let's protect our equipment and our tools.

The materials don't get stolen off the job site or their money.

Steven was talking about, okay, employee theft, but I think things are changing.

I don't know if you want to recap any of that from last time.

It's scary out there, but it's getting scarier.

It is, and things are moving fast.

We were talking about that Arup deep fake AI scandal where literally the person being asked to transfer the money was put on a video conference call with the head of the company and a bunch of key owners and supervisors that needed an emergency transfer of $25 million.

The whole thing was faked by AI.

The people, how they talked, their mannerisms, the little things that they knew about it.

And this was in 2024, Wade, which seems like a hundred years ago, as fast as AI is moving.

But anyway, it was almost $26 million fraud and that money has never been recovered.

Yeah, it's scary out there.

And

a lot of that had to do with getting that data and knowing who you are dealing with.

And I don't necessarily want to go into the same things, but a lot of things we're thinking about is for the money side of it.

But sometimes the most important stuff is the data.

That's a valuable asset that is not on somebody's balance sheet.

your email account gets hacked you probably got years of data on your financial records and your vendors and how you price it who your customers are banking details all that stuff makes everything a lot easier to search organize and basically use against you there was a thing i looked at yesterday that said 30 of the fraud in the retail sector right now is coming from ai bots that just do it all day, every day, you know, it's very cheap and fast and easy for them to attack on multiple fronts.

A contractor wouldn't leave that $100,000 excavator sitting around with the keys in it.

But a lot of times what I think people are doing nowadays with AI is sometimes they're leaving the keys sitting out in the open.

So that's what I want to talk about today.