AI and Prompt Engineering: The New Weapons of Social Engineering Attacks

As Artificial Intelligence technologies continue to advance, their integration into social engineering tactics poses new and evolving threats to cybersecurity. This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and social engineering, examining the risks and challenges associated with the malicious use of Artificial Intelligence-driven techniques. The research assesses the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence of creating sophisticated and targeted social engineering attacks to exploit human vulnerabilities. The results revealed some intriguing insights into the efficacy of Artificial Intelligence-generated phishing emails compared to those composed by humans. Our motivation behind this work is to assess the impact of Artificial Intelligence used in social engineering for warfare on the Internet-connected world and recognize the attacks because, in addition to the kinetic attacks, malicious forces can employ non-kinetic attacks as well, such as cyber-attacks and social engineering attacks to disrupt critical infrastructure. In the ongoing cyberwar, the urgent recognition of phishing attempts is of utmost importance.