Gut feeling does nothing against AI spear phishing texts

A study presented at the 2026 USENIX Security Symposium found that AI-generated spear phishing texts are nearly indistinguishable from legitimate messages, with a credit union banker unable to identify a fake alert that mimicked the bank's own fraud notification. The research, led by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, showed that human intuition is ineffective against AI-crafted phishing, highlighting the need for advanced detection tools.

A banker at a credit union sat down at a table with a dozen printed text messages, all of them written for that banker personally, and put them in order from the one most likely to get a click down to the one least likely. One of them stopped the sorting. It looked like something the bank sends out: “alert literally looks like the alert we get at work when there’s a fraud.” Half the … More https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/08/07/ai-spear-phishing-research/ The post Gut feeling does nothing against AI spear phishing texts https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/08/07/ai-spear-phishing-research/ appeared first on Help Net Security https://www.helpnetsecurity.com .