Reformed hacker who made millions stealing identities warns of 3 rising cyber threats — and how to stay safe (www.businessinsider.com)

Brett Johnson, a reformed identity thief who now consults with the Secret Service and private firms, warns that AI and industrialized crime are transforming fraud into a faster, harder-to-detect menace. He highlights three rising threats: realistic deepfakes that can mimic voices and live video to impersonate trusted colleagues (one finance clerk was tricked into approving more than $25 million), organized “scam farms” that run like corporations—including trafficked workers executing long-running “pig butchering” romance scams—and synthetic identities, where blended real-and-fake data creates nonexistent people that account for roughly 80% of new-account fraud and a significant share of chargebacks and debt. Johnson warns AI will soon generate tailored scams end-to-end: writing messages, faking evidence, and conducting live interactions with victims. The implications for AI/ML practitioners and defenders are clear: adversarial automation and scale will outpace traditional detection unless systems evolve to verify provenance and behavioral signals. Johnson recommends practical protections for individuals—practice situational awareness, freeze household credit, set transaction alerts, use unique passwords, enable multifactor authentication, and limit personal data shared on social media—to blunt account-takeover and synthetic ID attacks. The story underscores an urgent need for improved authentication, provenance verification, and fraud-detection models that can cope with AI-generated identity fabrications and coordinated, human-run fraud operations.