Major Wall Street Hedge Funds Targeted in Coordinated AI Voice Scam Cyber Attacks

Big US hedge funds hit by wave of cyber attacks

Several of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street have been hit by a wave of cyber attacks, putting the industry on high alert to the risk of vulnerabilities in their software systems. Billionaire Steve Cohen's Point72 and Ken Griffin's Citadel were among the hedge funds that were targeted by audio "phishing" attacks, attempts to obtain private information through phone calls and similar means, in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter. Millennium Management was also targeted by cyber attacks, according to a person familiar with the matter. All of the firms run complex risk systems with confidential trading information and manage tens of billions of dollars, making them prime potential targets for cyber criminals. Point72 was investigating the incident and trying to determine whether their systems were breached, according to one person familiar with the matter. It has contacted law enforcement and hired cyber security experts. The hedge fund also emailed investors on Wednesday to inform them that it did not believe any client information had been stolen. Citadel did not appear to be breached in the attack, according to other people familiar with the matter. One of the people highlighted that phishing attacks were common, but that the number of attacks had increased recently. All of the firms declined to comment. Bloomberg first reported the attempted attacks at some of the firms. At least some of the incidents involved voice phishing scams, in which the perpetrator impersonated a trusted person or colleague through phone calls or other audio communication, according to the people. It was not clear who was behind the attacks, or if they were co-ordinated by a single group. At one of the hedge funds, cyber criminals impersonated the firm's help desk, according to one person familiar with the matter. They contacted employees to try to gain login credentials for their authenticator apps, which serve as an additional layer of security in accessing a company's software system beyond usernames and passwords. The incidents come as governments and companies are racing to respond to the launch of AI tools that have made it easier for cyber criminals and state-backed groups to hack targets. Frontier AI models, in particular, have supercharged a cyber arms race as malign actors develop new abilities to attack while companies and governments seek new ways to defend themselves. A cyberdefence group at Google published a report in June detailing a similar series of incidents at law firms and financial institutions, in which the attackers also used phone calls to mimic IT employees. Wall Street groups have poured resources into beefing up their own cyber security systems in recent years, as AI has heightened the possibility that even unsophisticated actors could successfully hack into a company's network.

AI-Powered 'Vishing' Attacks Reportedly Targeted Top Hedge Funds

Amid all the recent reports of AI systems autonomously going off the rails and hacking into third-party organizations, it's almost easy to forget that human hackers are still out there, experimenting with AI in all kinds of nefarious ways. A new report from Bloomberg, however, is a reminder of just how quickly AI-enabled cybercrime is evolving -- and how unprepared the world is to deal with it. According to the report, a litany of high-profile hedge funds, including Citadel and Two Sigma, were targeted by recent voice phishing, or "vishing," attacks, in which AI is used to simulate the voices of actual humans in an attempt to skirt security systems. Several private equity firms were also reportedly targeted. Two Sigma told Bloomberg that it caught the attack in time before any of its internal systems could be compromised; Citadel and Point72, another hedge fund included in the attack, did not immediately respond to Gizmodo's request for comment. IT experts have been warning for years that the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use AI tools that mimic human speech or generate other kinds of deepfake content will escalate both the severity of scam attempts and the rate at which they occur. The world got a taste of this in 2024, when an employee at the Hong Kong branch of a multinational company was duped into wiring more than $25.5 million to scammers who had instructed her to do so using AI-generated deepfakes of company employees, including its chief financial officer. AI scams are also being deployed to tip political scales. Last summer, for example, someone (or a group of people working together) used AI to recreate the voice of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then sent voice messages to foreign diplomats and federal officials. OpenAI also said in a June report that a fleet of scammers, all of whom appear to have been backed by the Chinese government, had been illicitly using ChatGPT to generate inflammatory social media content aimed at fueling Americans' resentment towards data centers, the power cells of the United States' AI industry. All the while, the market pressures of the AI race -- combined with a total lack of federal regulation -- have been pushing tech developers to build increasingly capable models, including ones designed to imitate human speech. (Such tools are often promoted as "companions" that can alleviate loneliness, even though research has indicated they can sometimes have the opposite effect.) OpenAI's latest voice model, GPT-Live-1, is engineered to imitate subtle nuances of human speech, and, in theory, make interacting with AI feel less awkwardly mechanical. By design, OpenAI's model cannot imitate the voices of real people; that was a lesson OpenAI had to learn the hard way after it received earlier public blowback for releasing a voice model that, to many people's ears, sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. This is all to say: Nobody should be surprised that vishing attacks are on the rise. Technologically-enabled scam artistry is a tale as old as time, and AI is arguably the most enabling tool ever invented in that regard. The real mystery is why more isn't being done to build actually effective safeguards into AI systems to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Wall Street's Biggest Hedge Funds Targeted by Hackers in AI Voice Scam - iShares Cybersecurity and Tech E

Hackers launched a coordinated wave of attacks against some of Wall Street's largest hedge funds in recent days, using AI to mimic employees' voices and trick staff into granting system access, according to a Bloomberg report published Wednesday. Inside the Target List Two Sigma Investments confirmed it was targeted in an attempted vishing (voice phishing) campaign. "Our security team responded quickly to an attempted vishing campaign targeting Two Sigma and other investment managers, and we have no indication of any impact to our data or our systems," Two Sigma said in a statement, per Bloomberg. Ken Griffin's Citadel and Steve Cohen's Point72 Asset Management were also targeted, though spokespeople for both firms declined to say whether hackers actually breached their systems. Several unnamed private equity firms faced similar attempts, per Bloomberg. The attackers allegedly used technology capable of listening to phone calls and then replicating a speaker's voice, tone and phrasing to fabricate convincing fake calls. Regulators are already responding. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) launched its Financial Intelligence Fusion Center in March, giving members a channel to share fraud intelligence and coordinate responses to sophisticated threats. A FINRA spokesperson declined to comment on the specific incident but confirmed contact with affected firms, according to Bloomberg. The Bigger Cybersecurity Reckoning Will Wilson, CEO of IT security firm Antithesis, argued financial firms benefited for decades from the scarcity of hacking expertise. Modern AI has "commoditized" that skill set, he said, pushing hedge funds and other firms toward urgent security upgrades or serious consequences. "The terrifying thing about modern-day AI systems is that they have commoditized this and made it possible to execute attacks at scale," Wilson said, according to Bloomberg. "Everybody will have to seriously level up. Otherwise they are going to be in big trouble." No confirmed breaches, stolen data, ransom demands or financial losses have been publicly disclosed from this specific campaign. The stakes remain high given that Wall Street firms process trillions of dollars in daily transactions, and AI allows for easier access to cyberweapons against even the most sophisticated financial institutions. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.