How AI Is Being Used to Fight Phishing (As Well As Create It)

How AI Is Being Used to Fight Phishing (As Well As Create It)

We've talked a lot about how AI is making phishing more convincing. But AI is also one of the most powerful tools in the defender's arsenal. Here's how the arms race is playing out — and what it means for your business.

AI in the hands of attackers:

• Generating perfect, culturally appropriate phishing emails at scale
• Cloning voices and video for deepfake scams
• Automating spear phishing research across social media
• Personalising attacks based on scraped data

AI in the hands of defenders:

1. AI-powered email security Modern email security tools use machine learning to analyse the characteristics of every email that comes in — not just checking against known-bad senders, but detecting patterns that indicate phishing behaviour.

They look at things like: writing style deviations from known contacts, unusual sending patterns, suspicious link structures, and header anomalies. This can catch novel phishing attacks that pattern-based rules would miss.

2. Behavioural analysis AI security tools monitor how users normally interact with systems — when they log in, from where, what they do — and flag anomalies. If someone's credentials are used at 3am from an overseas IP address, that's flagged immediately.

3. Phishing link detection AI tools analyse URLs in real-time, visiting them in sandboxed environments to detect malicious behaviour before you ever see the link.

4. Deepfake detection Emerging tools are developing AI models specifically designed to detect AI-generated audio and video. Not yet perfect, but developing rapidly.

5. Automated incident response When a phishing attack is detected, AI-powered security tools can automatically quarantine affected accounts, reset credentials, and initiate investigation workflows — faster than a human team could respond.

What this means for Australian SMBs:

Most of these tools are built into enterprise security platforms that SMBs can access through managed service providers. You don't need to deploy them yourself.

If you use Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender already includes AI-powered phishing detection. If you use Google Workspace, similar capabilities exist in their security features. Ask your IT provider whether these features are enabled.

The bottom line on the AI arms race:

AI is making phishing attacks better and making defences better. The tools available to defenders are genuinely impressive. But technology is only part of the answer — because even the best AI security tool can't stop a user who has been socially engineered into deliberately handing over credentials.

The human layer still matters.

Train the human layer at Phishbate — free →