255 | 🥷🎣 AI-driven ID attacks are accelerating

In today’s Brainyacts:

1. AI-attacks are accelerating

2. OpenAI’s Days 3 & 4

3. Grok goes big and other AI model news

4. Tech CEOs US elections donations plus more news you can use

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To read previous editions, click here.

Lead Memo 🎣🥷 The Rise of AI-Driven Attacks: What Legal Professionals Need to Know

Statistics That Should Alarm You

• 2 minutes and 7 seconds: The record time it takes for cybercriminals to escalate an intrusion into a system breach.

• 75% increase in cloud intrusions: Highlighting the growing vulnerability of cloud-based data.

• 41% of enterprises: Reporting AI-related security incidents, emphasizing how pervasive the threat has become.

These numbers underline the urgent need for legal professionals to understand and mitigate these risks.

Gen AI is no longer a futuristic concept confined to research labs; it’s shaping industries, enhancing workflows, and unfortunately, equipping cybercriminals with sophisticated tools. The integration of AI into cyberattacks has shifted the paradigm, making businesses, including legal organizations, increasingly vulnerable to advanced threats. With 77% of enterprises already victimized by AI-enabled attacks, understanding these threats is critical for professionals, especially in fields reliant on sensitive data.

What Is a Security Operations Center (SOC), and Why Does It Matter?

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a dedicated team or facility responsible for monitoring, detecting, and responding to cybersecurity threats in real time. However, not all businesses have the resources to establish a SOC. In such cases, responsibility often falls on IT departments, external managed security providers, or in smaller organizations, even individual executives juggling multiple roles.

SOC teams are at the forefront of defending against AI-based attacks, which exploit advanced tools to breach systems, steal data, and undermine trust. Their absence—or even inefficiency—can leave organizations dangerously exposed.

Why Are AI-Driven Attacks So Effective?

AI enhances the speed, precision, and deception of cyberattacks. Here’s how attackers exploit it:

1. Identity-Based Attacks: Adversaries use AI to create deepfake voices, images, and videos, enabling them to breach Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems by mimicking legitimate users.

2. Data Poisoning: Attackers corrupt the training data of AI systems, degrading their performance or controlling their outputs. Gartner reports that nearly 30% of AI-enabled organizations have faced such attacks.

3. Evasion Attacks: Slight manipulations in data (e.g., altering an image) can trick AI systems into misclassifying inputs, leading to real-world consequences, such as bypassing security checkpoints.

4. Model Stealing and Inversion: Attackers replicate or infer sensitive data from AI systems through repeated API queries, posing risks to intellectual property and privacy.

Why the Legal Sector Is a Prime Target

Legal organizations handle vast amounts of sensitive information, including confidential client data, intellectual property, and financial records. Cybercriminals recognize the value of this data, leveraging AI to:

• Impersonate trusted parties in phishing scams.

• Breach databases using deepfake credentials.

• Exploit vulnerabilities in case management systems or document repositories.

These attacks undermine trust—the cornerstone of the legal profession—and can lead to financial loss, reputational damage, and compliance penalties.

Key Takeaways for Legal Professionals

1. AI is both a tool and a threat: While AI enhances productivity, it also equips adversaries with unparalleled capabilities. Legal teams must balance adoption with robust security measures.

2. Collaboration is essential: Aligning IT, legal, and executive teams ensures a unified response to threats. Miscommunication or silos can create vulnerabilities.

3. Education and vigilance are critical: Staying informed about the evolving threat landscape is the first line of defense. Invest in training to recognize and respond to attacks.

4. Trust must be safeguarded: The legal profession relies on the integrity of its data and systems. AI-driven breaches can erode this trust, making prevention paramount.

Spotlight 

🎄🎅 OpenAI’s “12 days of OpenAI” continues:

🎁 Day 3 “Gift” - Sora

OpenAI’s new video-generating AI, Sora, is finally rolling out to users in the U.S. and select countries, offering an exciting tool for creating and editing videos with AI-driven precision. After nine months of anticipation, ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers are now gaining access to this powerful technology.

What is Sora?

Sora turns text into videos through an intuitive interface, enabling creators to generate up to 50 videos per month on the $20/month Plus plan or 500 videos on the $200/month Pro plan. Pro users also enjoy unlimited slower-mode access, making it a versatile tool for different levels of content production. Whether you want to generate film-noir style clips, experiment with stop-motion effects, or create storyboards by combining multiple video scenes, Sora offers advanced features for creative flexibility.

Why Now?

Sora faces stiff competition in the crowded AI video space but comes with notable improvements since its initial launch. Video generation is now faster—minutes instead of hours—and the tool is especially adept at maintaining consistent characters across longer clips. However, features like image-to-video conversion are still a work in progress.

Why Should You Care?

For marketers, content creators, or businesses looking for cost-effective video solutions, Sora offers significant value compared to traditional video production costs. While it’s not ready to replace a professional video team, it’s a game-changer for quick, high-quality social media or marketing content. The current downside? New sign-ups are paused due to high demand, and most of Europe remains excluded from access.

Bottom Line

Sora is a promising tool for creatives and businesses looking to streamline their video production process. While there are still gaps to fill, its blend of speed, style variety, and character consistency makes it a compelling option worth exploring.

🚨 But wait - demand is outpacing OpenAI’s ability to deliver it so you may have to wait a bit:

🎁 Day 4 “Gift” - Canvas

What is Canvas?

Think of it as an AI-superpowered Google Docs.

What we are getting'?

• Canvas available to all users

• Ability to run Python inside Canvas 

• Canvas embedded into custom GPTs

AI Model Notables

► Grok is now free for all X users.

► Musk’s Grok AI introduces Aurora, a photo-realistic image generator with minimal restrictions.

► Reddit has launched a new AI-powered search tool called Reddit Answers to help users find information directly from the platform.

► A veteran of OpenAI’s voice assistant project reportedly launched WaveForms AI to make voice interactions indistinguishable from real conversations, emphasizing emotional depth.

► Google’s quantum computing lab has revealed a new, “mindboggling” chip—Willow—that reportedly takes five minutes to solve a computing issue, that would currently take the world's fastest supercomputer ten septillion—10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—to complete.

► Google kicks off $20B renewable energy building spree to power AI.

News You Can Use:

➭ Revealed: the tech bosses who poured $394.1m into US election - and how they compared to Elon Musk.

➭ China probes Nvidia for potential anti-monopoly violations.

➭ Microsoft consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman sat down with The Verge for a wide-ranging interview discussing OpenAI, joining Microsoft, his time at DeepMind and more.

Who is the author, Josh Kubicki?

Some of you know me. Others do not. Here is a short intro. I am a lawyer, entrepreneur, and teacher. I have transformed legal practices and built multi-million dollar businesses. Not a theorist, I am an applied researcher and former Chief Strategy Officer, recognized by Fast Company and Bloomberg Law for my unique work. Through this newsletter, I offer you pragmatic insights into leveraging AI to inform and improve your daily life in legal services.