Security software doesn’t always help with every scam — you still need your wits about you — but a piece of software shown at CES could help you work out what’s real online.
The rise of AI has paved the way for lots of things, many of which are designed to assist you in your life. But you know what isn’t designed to assist? Deepfake images and videos, as well as the regular onslaught of scams across our phones and emails.
Designed to deceive rather than assist, scammers certainly intend to make life more complex, and the software out there can only do so much. Much of what we know to go on the defence against cybercriminals comes from learning and education, with your skepticism one of the chief weapons in working out what’s real and what’s not.
But scammers are getting better at deception. With artificial intelligence assisting people in all manner of ways, AI is also assisting scammers and criminals, delivering spammy and scammy messages that look legit, as well as photos and videos designed to look real, and yet are anything but.
McAfee has chosen CES 2025 as the ideal time to talk about a technology it’s launching designed to flag when messages, images, and videos are scams, or at the very least, look risky, and you need to know about it.
A future part of the McAfee security suite, McAfee’s AI-powered scam detector can look at emails, text messages on phones, as well as image and videos from within browsers, providing an app assisted approached to working out whether the messages you’ve received are legit.
“Scammers are getting smarter every day, using technology like artificial intelligence to make their tricks more convincing and harder to spot,” said Tyler McGee, Head of McAfee in the Asia Pacific region.
“They play on people’s emotions – like fear, urgency, or trust – to get what they want,” said McGee. “That’s why we created McAfee Scam Detector, powered by AI. It warns you about scams before they can cause harm, helps you stay in control of your personal information, and helps you build the skills needed to outsmart scammers for good.”
While outsmarting them for good may be a bit of a stretch, especially given how the scam and threat landscape is changing, it will definitely provide an assist, and is something phone owners don’t typically get.
With most phone apps working from within their own sandbox, this sort of access has largely been off limits for security experts and software. However, with McAfee Scam Detector, it will apparently work across phone, laptop, tablet, and even Chromebook for people with a McAfee subscription when it works.
We’ll let you know just how it works and if it’s successful when it does launch, but it does seem as though help is on the way.
