Payment protection solution Eftsure is issuing an urgent call to finance leaders and accounts teams, advising that cyber criminals are using technology like artificial intelligence (AI) to improve and scale fraud tactics, necessitating more adversarial thinking from finance leaders. To help them develop and incorporate that thinking into their anti-fraud controls, Eftsure has released a guide aimed at keeping finance functions safe from scams and cyber crime.
Now in its eighth edition of the resource, The Cybersecurity Guide for CFOs outlines today’s threat landscape and fraud risks, as well as how to use adversarial mindsets to identify risks and pre-empt sophisticated new scam tactics.
Many of those tactics come in the form of business email compromise (BEC), in which malicious actors impersonate or compromise the accounts of trusted contacts as a way to swindle targets into making fraudulent payments. The most recent estimates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) put BEC scam losses around $2.9B (USD) in the US alone.
“It’s no longer safe for finance leaders to depend on fraud controls designed within and for a mostly analogue, pre-AI world,” says Jon Soldan, Eftsure’s Chief Executive Officer. “Designing and maintaining controls for a new world of cybercrime requires a new way of thinking.”
While many fraud tactics remain fundamentally the same, growing access to AI tools and other technology is helping scammers create more targeted, hard-to-detect schemes – consequently, experts say a stronger security posture requires leaders to understand AI and its malicious uses.
“Finance leaders need to learn AI and the best way to do that is by building an AI system. It is critical that these leaders know how LLMs work, not just to help them amplify the work of their organisations but also to understand how the security and privacy landscape has changed,” says Noelle Russell, Chief AI Officer at the AI Leadership Institute.
The problem may be even broader than BECs or AI-enabled tactics. An analysis from Nasdaq and Verafin estimates that, globally, organisations lost $485.6B (USD) to scams and schemes in 2024, while another analysis from the Association of Finance Professionals found that 80% of US organisations were targeted in payments fraud attempts last year.
“To protect against today’s wave of scams, finance leaders will need to think like a scammer,” says Soldan.
“That’s why this year’s Cybersecurity Guide for CFOs will show finance leaders how to apply cyber security concepts like red teaming and introduce adversarial thinking into their strategies – and explains why doing so has become an existential necessity for organisations everywhere.”
