(Image: HMRC)
South Korea's finance watch dog, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), together with SK Telecom, will develop AI to prevent voice phishing attacks.
The FSS will provide its data on financial fraud while the telecommunications carrier will build an AI system that alerts callers when it is suspected that they have received a voice phishing call.
The FSS said damages caused by voice phishing in the first half of this year amounted to 180.2 billion won ($159 million), an increase of a staggering 73.7 percent from a year ago.
Existing filtering methods detect phishing attacks based on the use of certain keywords. The new AI system will detect phishing attacks based on context, the FSS said.
The service is expected to roll out sometime in the first half of next year.
Phishing, whether through voice or email, has risen globally as a serious threat. Cybersecurity company FireEye, which examined over half-a-billion emails sent between January and June 2018, found that one in 101 emails were classified as being malicious.
South Korea has been looking into various ways to apply AI into industries starting in 2016, following the Go-bout between AlphaGo and local player Lee Se-dol, in which the latter lost.
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