The fake Rolex problem: How AI turned amateur attackers into nation-state threats | Tech Radar

Overview

News, deals, reviews, guides and more on the newest computing gadgets

Start exploring exclusive deals, expert advice and more

Details

Unlock and manage exclusive Techradar member rewards.

Unlock instant access to exclusive member features.

Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.

The fake Rolex problem: How AI turned amateur attackers into nation-state threats

AI turns phishing into scalable, expert-level attacks

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Have you ever held a really good fake Rolex? Not the forty-dollar beach version. The kind that makes a jeweler pause.

The movement is Swiss. The crystal is sapphire. The bracelet is 904L steel, the same alloy Rolex actually uses. Every component genuine, sourced from real suppliers, assembled with real craftsmanship.

The only thing that's fake is the crown on the dial, and the person selling it to you.

How AI-powered threats are rewriting email security economics

Spotting the spyware: How modern spies are weaponizing phishing

How businesses can defend themselves against the rise of ‘phishing as a service’

That's the state of phishing in 2026. The emails hitting your inbox right now are built from real parts.

Real Send Grid accounts. Real Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. Real Google redirects. Real Microsoft domains. Your security tools inspect each component and return a clean verdict, because each component is legitimate. The only counterfeit is the intent.

What makes this moment different from every prior evolution of the threat is this: AI tools didn’t just make these attacks more convincing. It made the expertise required to build them nearly free.

In November 2024, researchers at Harvard Kennedy School published a study that should have reset how the industry thinks about AI-enabled attacks.

Led by Fred Heiding and co-authored with Bruce Schneier, the paper found that fully AI-automated spear phishing emails achieved a 54% click-through rate — statistically identical to emails crafted by human experts, and 350% higher than generic phishing. Cost per attack: roughly four cents.

AI doesn’t just make phishing cheaper. It makes it profitable at scale for almost anyone. The researchers calculated that AI-enhanced phishing can increase attacker profitability by up to 50 times compared to traditional methods.

AI powers innovation – but it’s also powering the next wave of cyber attacks

AI-created malware is on the rise – here's what your business needs to stay safe

Friend or foe? AI: The new cybersecurity threat and solutions

The assumption going into this shift was that attackers would lean on AI for personalization — better writing, more convincing lures, deeper context. That turned out to be only part of the story.

Analysis of thousands of real-world attacks that bypassed leading enterprise email security systems shows that the biggest change is not better language. It is better construction.

Attackers are not just personalizing emails. They are personalizing kill chains.

The Harvard framing, AI as a cost collapses, was accurate as far as it went. But cost reduction is the first-order effect. The second-order effect is more consequential. When you eliminate the expertise barrier, you don’t just get more phishing. You get a collapse in the skill ceiling.

The kind of kill chain engineering now showing up in common attacks — dozens of evasion techniques, hundreds of unique combinations, tuned to specific behaviors of Microsoft Defender or Google Workspace — used to require nation-state resources. It required operators who understood enterprise security stacks well enough to design custom paths through them.

That level of capability is no longer rare. The floor has risen. Average attackers are now producing what used to be considered advanced persistent threat-level tradecraft.

That is a different problem than “AI makes phishing emails more convincing.”

What a personalized kill chain actually looks like

In observed data, more than half of attacks use four or more evasion techniques simultaneously. The average attack combines just over four. Combination attacks are growing rapidly year over year.

One representative chain: a QR code attack targeting a Google Workspace tenant. The email contains no URL, only an embedded QR code. Automated scanners have nothing to analyze. The QR resolves to a CAPTCHA gate, blocking sandbox environments. Behind that sits a multi-hop redirect through trusted cloud providers — AWS, then Cloudflare — leading to a credential harvesting page impersonating a Microsoft MFA prompt. The language mirrors real authentication requests users see regularly.

Now compare that to an entirely different attack pattern, like HTML smuggling inside a PDF where the payload assembles in the browser and never exists as a file in transit. There is almost no overlap in detection logic between the two.

The combinatorial space is too large. And AI is expanding it faster than defenders can keep up.

The Harvard study found that AI models still needed human intervention to match expert attackers in 2023. By 2024, that gap had closed. Fully automated systems reached parity. The expectation is that they will surpass human expertise outright.

Traditional secure email gateways were built for a different threat model.

• Signature detection works when attackers cannot mutate continuously.

• Reputation filtering works when malicious infrastructure looks different from legitimate infrastructure.

Consider the same QR-based attack evaluated through different approaches.

A rule-based system sees no URL, no attachment, no known indicators. Verdict: clean.

A machine learning system flags a recently registered domain and assigns medium confidence. In most environments, that is effectively ignored.

A reasoning-based approach asks a different question: why is a new domain sending an MFA flow through a CAPTCHA-gated redirect chain to a user with no prior authentication activity tied to it?

AI didn’t just increase the volume of attacks. It raised the baseline capability of attackers.

The question is not whether existing defenses were built for this environment. They weren’t.

The question is how detection evolves when attacks are no longer defined by individual indicators, but by how those indicators are assembled.

• How well does your detection approach handle multi-step attacks where every single attack component is “not suspicious” in isolation?

• Can your systems evaluate intent, so that attacks with seemingly no “smoking guns” can be detected when traditional security reputation checks fail (bad url, bad file, bad domain).

• How quickly can you analyze, verify and contain these advanced threats, with your current stack given that dwell times are compressing rapidly?

This is no longer a question of catching bad emails. It’s a question of whether you can recognize intent before it’s too late.

This article was produced as part of Tech Radar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Tech Radar Pro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

1‘Extraction and distillation’: US State Department upgrades AI theft accusations to target China’s Deepseek, Moonshot AI and Mini Max

2 Belkin’s Lilypad i Pad case brings Toy Story 5’s newest character into the real world in the most functional way yet

3 Jensen Huang tells CEOs 'don't leave' California — Nvidia CEO says he's fine paying the ‘highest taxes in the world'

4 What is the release date for Daredevil: Born Again season 2 episode 7 on Disney+?

5 Gamers, it's time to get excited — the Steam Machine's price and launch date may be imminent

Tech Radar is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Key Takeaways

• News, deals, reviews, guides and more on the newest computing gadgets
• Start exploring exclusive deals, expert advice and more
• Unlock and manage exclusive Techradar member rewards
• Unlock instant access to exclusive member features
• Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards