AI agents are becoming increasingly popular among hackers to exploit online bank accounts. By 2027, it is estimated that they will reduce the time to take over an account by 50%.

This is how journalist Anton Mous tells it from cybernews.com.

This is the stark and harsh reality that the U.S. research and advisory company Gartner describes in its latest report, Predicts 2025: Navigating Imminent AI Turbulence for Cybersecurity.

AI agents are becoming useful tools for attackers to break online account protections. Therefore, marketers will need to introduce monitoring tools to analyse interactions with AI agents. This also means that cybersecurity companies should accelerate the move towards passwordless, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Account takeover remains a persistent attack vector because weak authentication credentials, such as passwords, are collected by a variety of means, such as data breaches, phishing, social engineering and malware. Attackers leverage bots to automate a barrage of login attempts to various services in the hope that the credentials have been reused across multiple platforms.

Technology-enabled social engineering will also pose a significant threat to corporate cybersecurity in the near future, including audio and video deepfake. By 2028, 40% of all social engineering attacks are expected to target both senior executives and the general workforce, Gartner predicts.

Gartner notes that although only a few cases have been reported so far, those that have occurred have resulted in significant economic damage to the affected parties. Therefore, these incidents should be seen as a wake-up call and a signal that companies should increase their efforts to protect their digital environment.

Organisations will need to stay abreast of the market and adapt procedures and workflows to try to better resist attacks leveraging counterfeit reality techniques.

Educating employees about the evolving threat landscape through the use of specific training on social engineering with deepfakes is a key step, as Gartner analyst Manuel Acosta believes.

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