FRANKFURT: Artificial intelligence is making cyberattacks increasingly sophisticated and costlier for businesses, reinsurer Munich Re said Wednesday, warning of methods ranging from highly personalised phishing emails to computer-generated, convincing fake identities.
“If cybercrime were a country, it would be the third-largest economy in the world”, behind only the United States and China, the reinsurer said in a report. Citing figures from market analysis firm Statista, Munich Re projected cybercrime will generate global losses of some $14 billion (12.07 bn euros) in 2028.
Martin Kreuzer, head of cyber risks at Munich Re, told AFP that “automation now plays a central role”, enabling attackers to operate “efficiently and in a more targeted way”. “They rely on highly personalised phishing emails, automatically generated malware, and synthetic identities that appear deceptively real,” he said. The trend of “agentic AI” means the advent of systems that can “act autonomously, make decisions, and even circumvent defensive mechanisms,” according to Kreuzer.
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