Last week, Google’s threat intelligence group warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is making malware attacks more dangerous.

[Malware is malicious software—programmes designed to disrupt, damage or gain unauthorised access to computer systems—usually delivered via phishing emails, compromised websites or infected downloads]

“Adversaries are no longer leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) just for productivity gains, they are deploying novel AI-enabled malware in active operations,” Google said in a 5000-word blog.

Are malware programmes using Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically generate malicious scripts, obfuscate their own code to evade detection, and leverage AI models to create malicious functions on demand, as Google warns?

Or it this yet another case of tech firms selling solutions to a problem they have created themselves?

Listen to the latest episode of Unseen Money from New Money Review, featuring co-hosts Timur Yunusov and Paul Amery, to hear more about the effect of AI malware.

In the podcast, we cover:

• Google’s warning about the rise of AI malware – reality or hype? (2’ 35”)
• Why LLMs were originally protected from harmful behaviour (4’ 10”)
• How criminals learned to develop LLMs without guardrails (4’ 55”)
• Model context protocols (MCPs) and AI agents as offensive tools (5’ 30”)
• Malicious payloads and web application firewalls (7’ 35”)
• Tricking LLMs by exploiting the wide range of input variables (8’ 30”)
• The state of the art for fraudsters when using LLMs (10’ 10”)
• Timur used AI to learn how to drain funds from a stolen phone (11’ 05”)
• How worried is Timur about the rise of AI malware? (14’ 20”)
• AI has dramatically reduced the cost and increased the speed of producing malware (15’)
• AI, teenage suicides and protecting users (16’ 50”)
• AI for good: using AI to combat AI malware (19’)
• How a Russian bank used AI chatbots to divert fraudsters (19’ 40”)
• Data poisoning—manipulating the training data for AI models (22’ 10”)
• Techniques for tricking LLMs (23’)
• Only state actors can manipulate AI models at scale (25’ 40”)
• The use of SMS blasters by fraudsters is exploding! (27’)

Some people have labelled the recent alliance between Silicon Valley and right-wing populist leaders “techno-fascism”. Is that too strong a term?

No, says Jacob Silverman in the latest New Money Review podcast.

“What do you call it when the highest levels of the corporate world merge with the executive of the government?” Silverman asks in the podcast. “I think that’s corporatism or fascism.”

Silverman is the author of a new book, “Gilded Rage”, in which he chronicles the radicalisation of Silicon Valley.  

Focusing on a few central characters—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks and Donald Trump—he poses a question that should concern us all. What happens if the world's richest and most powerful men decide to dismantle democracy?

“I think it’s very worrisome,” says Silverman. “We keep on breaching markers—things that haven’t happened before.”

Listen to the podcast to hear a discussion of:

• The post-9/11 convergence of technology and the security state
• How tech firms colluded with Trump to merge corporate and political power
• Why the technology of freedom may be incompatible with democracy
• Tech titans’ desire for social and physical escape
• JD Vance, the tech industry’s man in the White House
• The religiosity of Peter Thiel and JD Vance
• Rising nationalism and the booming defence tech industry
• How cryptocurrency catalysed the Republicans’ resurgence in the US
• Cryptocurrency as an accessory to political corruption
• How the AI boom was fed by the crypto bubble
• Why Jacob sued Twitter—and what happened next
• Donald Trump, Jeffrey Yass and the US government’s about-face on TikTok
• Social media as the informational battleground of global geopolitics

Long gone are the days when the Escobar family had to spend $2,500 a month on rubber bands to hold the cash they earned trading cocaine.

Now, the invention of cryptocurrency has made money launderers’ life a whole lot easier—or has it?

Investigative journalist Geoff White joins Paul Amery and Timur Yunusov in the latest episode of Unseen Money to discuss:

• Why a New York crypto money laundering case is attracting such close attention
• How technology has changed the business of crime
• Cryptocurrency mixers and decentralised finance
• North Korea and the Axie Infinity hack
• The ugly mix of organised crime, state sponsorship and espionage
• Sanctions regimes, cryptocurrency stablecoins and dollar hegemony
• Hackers, social media and money laundering
• Who will run the world’s digital money?

The decentralised finance (DeFi) market is booming—but the world’s best hackers are on a constant look-out for ways to steal your crypto tokens.

North Korea, which recently committed the largest theft in cryptocurrency history, is probably top of the hackers’ game.

What do crypto users need to know about the risks in this unregulated but fast-growing market?

In the latest episode of Unseen Money from New Money Review, Timur Yunusov and Paul Amery are joined by Arseny Reutov, chief technology officer at Decurity, a security audit and ethical hacking firm specialising in DeFi.

During the podcast, we discuss:

• Malware, ethereum and the recent $1.5bn Bybit hack
• State-of-the-art techniques in DeFi hacks
• Mixers, cross-chain bridges and the laundering of stolen funds
• How North Korea became the world leader in crypto hacks
• Ways of detecting flaws in DeFi smart contracts
• Who audits DeFi?
• Incentives to report, rather than exploit smart contract flaws
• Is DeFi security improving?

Most scams where the victim is tricked into paying money to fraudsters originate on social media—often on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

But in the UK around one scam in five—and nearly half by the total value stolen—exploits weaknesses in our telecommunications infrastructure.

That could be someone spoofing the number of a legitimate entity, such as the tax office or your bank, when calling you. It could be a scammer exploiting security vulnerabilities in the mobile network to compromise and intercept voice and SMS messages.

In a rapidly rising form of fraud, criminals impersonate the nearest cell phone tower and send messages that look like they’re from your bank or mobile service provider. One click on a link and you’re soon handing over valuable personal information or downloading malware that gives the scammers access to your payment app or crypto wallet.

In the latest episode of Unseen Money from New Money Review, my co-host Timur Yunusov and I are joined by telecom cybersecurity expert Dmitry Kurbatov, chief executive of UK-based company SecurityGen.

In the podcast, Dmitry explains how criminals can spoof a trusted entity’s phone number when calling you. We look at SIM swap frauds and discuss who bears responsibility for the continuing security flaws in mobile networks.

We highlight in which countries users are currently most exposed to mobile phone-based frauds. We look at the recent SK Telecoms breach in South Korea, which exposed the personal and financial data of up to 23 million users. And we describe the ever more ingenious methods being used by scammers to subvert telecoms networks.

Some technical terms used during the podcast:

“SIP trunking” is the digital method of making and receiving phone calls and other digital communication over an internet connection.

“SIP protocol” is a signalling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating multimedia sessions, including voice, video, and messaging.

“SIM farms” or “SIM boxes” bridge the internet and cellular networks, enabling the routing and redirection of calls or messages through multiple SIM cards.

“Rich Communication Services (RCS)” are a messaging protocol that enhances traditional SMS by offering richer features like multimedia sharing, group chats, read receipts and typing indicators.

“Drive-by smishing” is where fraudsters use fake base stations to force victims’ phones to connect to a fake mobile network and then use SMS messages to distribute malicious links or initiate scams.

In “software-defined radio”, components that are conventionally implemented in analogue hardware (e.g., mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors) are instead implemented by means of software on a computer.

A “global title” is an address used in SCCP (Signalling Connection Control Part, a network-layer protocol in telecommunications) for routing signalling messages on telecommunications networks.

“SS7” is a set of telecommunications protocols that are used to exchange information between different telephone networks.

“IPX” is a telecommunications interconnection model for the exchange of internet protocol-based traffic between customers of separate mobile and fixed operators.

The UK’s company formation process is fast, easy and cheap. The net result of being open to almost any business is that up to half the companies on the UK’s Companies House register may have no legitimate purpose.

Instead, those companies are used by fraudsters as a vital tool in scams and money laundering schemes. Many are set up using fake identities and addresses. Often, they break the reporting rules and never file accounts. And Companies House has become a honeypot for organised crime groups from around the world.

In the latest episode of the Unseen Money podcast, Timur Yunusov and I are joined by dark money expert Graham Barrow, who has exposed some of the worst failings of the UK’s company formation regime.

Belatedly, the UK government is acting to address those failings. But will new legislation go far and fast enough? Listen to the podcast to find out.

In the latest episode of Unseen Money, Timur Yunusov and Paul Amery talk about the role of QR codes in scams and whether these popular barcodes may lull users into a false sense of security.

Also in this episode:

• team Trump's Yemen fiasco, Signal and Telegram
• how scammers can mass-blast SMS phishing messages
• browser-within-browser attacks and their possible use in scams
• why the trend of limiting bank compensation to scam victims was inevitable

There’s a big security loophole affecting plastic payment cards—called a replay (or pre-play) attack. Banks have known about this loophole for years. But they may still blame you, the victim, if a scammer makes use of it.

In a 2022 fraud, a former British soldier holidaying in Brazil found that £20,000 had been charged to his bank card in eighteen separate transactions. The ex-soldier, Henry Williams, said he’d only used his card once and that most of the money had been taken from his account without his knowledge.

His bank, a well-known British high street name, initially refused to compensate him, arguing he must have authorised all the payments. Only a year later did the bank agree to refund him—partially and with a grudging apology.

Even after one of the UK’s best-known security experts intervened on behalf of the victim, the UK’s financial ombudsman, which is supposed to settle complaints between consumers and financial services businesses, sided more with the bank.

How does a replay attack occur? Most plastic debit (or credit) cards contain a chip which is used to identify and authenticate the user. The chip comes into action when the user taps the card on a contactless payment terminal (or inserts the card into the terminal and then enters a PIN code).

At this point, the payment terminal generates a number that is supposed to be unpredictable, ensuring that each payment transaction is a fresh one.

Unfortunately, payment terminals can be tampered with and the supposedly unguessable number can be manipulated. This opens the door to replay attacks—and to more paydays for criminals.

As many as half of all payment cards and half of all terminals may be vulnerable to exploitation, says my Unseen Money co-host Timur Yunusov, who demonstrates a card replay attack in this YouTube video.

In the latest episode of Unseen Money from New Money Review, we explore replay attacks: how they occur, why the vulnerability is still there more than a decade after it was exposed, and why the payments industry is so reluctant to address the issue.

We all now use one-time passcodes (OTPs) to verify our identity online.

In the last few weeks, I’ve personally received OTPs from Amazon, Apple, Google, the UK Driving Licence Authority, my pension provider, payments app Yotta, National Savings and parking app Ringgo. Some OTPs were sent to me in text (SMS) messages, others arrived via email.

Identity authentication online using OTPs is much safer than using a single piece of information like a password. But OTPs are not safe, for a number of reasons.

In the latest episode of “Unseen Money” from New Money Review, security researcher Timur Yunusov and I discuss some recent scams that involved stolen OTPs—from a $2m theft from the family of a Moscow teenager to an industrial-scale carding operation in China.

Our story covers the security of mobile networks, tech giants Apple and Google, the business models of criminal masterminds and bagfuls of stolen phones shipped around the world.

The UK prides itself in being open for innovative tech firms—and companies in general—to set up business. It takes only £12—and 15-20 minutes—to create a new company online.

But the laxity of the country’s system for new company formations has made the UK a goldmine for scammers. And the problem is getting worse: fraud, much of it digital, now accounts for over 40 per cent of all recorded crime in England and Wales

In the latest episode of Unseen Money, Timur Yunusov and I discuss a recent Financial Times article about a London-based fraud victim, Livia Giuggioli Firth, who was conned by scammers into sending £325k from her company’s bank account.

Instead of asking for compensation from her own bank for being a victim of an authorised push payment fraud, Ms. Giuggioli Firth took the unusual step of suing the scammers’ bank in court. This forced the disclosure of the names if not of the individual scammers, but of the network of companies they used to launder the stolen money.

The court case unveiled some of the principal weaknesses in the UK’s system for deterring and catching fraudsters.

In the podcast, we discuss:

• Why the UK is a heaven for digital fraudsters
• Why Companies House is still making it easy for criminals
• How the fintech and AI booms have fuelled scams
• Who’s responsible in the UK for fighting scammers?
• How criminals second-guess anti-fraud systems and the need for ongoing due diligence
• The role of cryptocurrency in laundering stolen money
• Should Zuckerberg and Musk reimburse digital fraud victims?
• Why AI-enabled scams are certain to become more dangerous

Want to join Timur and me on a future episode of Unseen Money to talk about how scammers use Companies House registrations to aid their crimes? Drop me a line at [email protected].