How AI-Driven Behavioral Anomaly Detection Makes Phishing Attacks Harder to Spot and Stop

AI Threats and Behavior-Based Awareness Training

Evan Reiser, co-founder and CEO of Abnormal AI, highlights how artificial intelligence has changed security awareness training. The shift has moved away from manual, synthetic, and one-size-fits-all campaigns toward personalized, automated, and relevant approaches. This change is reflected in the company's recent rebranding from Abnormal Security to Abnormal AI, signaling its expansion into a broader AI-native security platform.

Reiser points out that AI has made cyber attacks more personal, scalable, and realistic. It has empowered unskilled actors to carry out sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks that were once out of reach. On the flip side, AI enables organizations to deploy personalized phishing training and behavioral anomaly detection, solutions that were previously too costly or difficult to implement.

By leveraging AI, companies can automate internal processes, simplifying operations and increasing agility. As Reiser puts it, “It allows more people to be criminals. It allows more of those criminals to send more attacks, and probably most scarily, those attacks are more sophisticated. AI can generate new ways of tricking people that we probably couldn't imagine a couple of years ago. So it's about increasing the volume and the efficacy of different attacks.”

Key Points from the Interview

• The U.S. government remains a high-value, high-risk target for AI-powered attacks.
• Security protections need to consider local norms and specific attack styles to be effective.
• AI lowers the barrier for organizations to build their own security capabilities internally.

Before co-founding Abnormal in 2018, Evan Reiser led product management and machine learning teams at Twitter’s advertising division. He also co-founded several companies, including Bloomspot (acquired by JPMorgan Chase) and AdStack (acquired by TellApart). His early career involved research and development in machine learning for intelligence applications at Eastman Kodak.

For those interested in learning more about AI’s role in cybersecurity and behavior-based training, exploring specialized courses can be valuable. Resources like Complete AI Training's latest AI courses offer practical insights into AI-driven security solutions.