Artificial Intelligence is creating lots of new opportunities for efficiencies and enabling enhanced search experiences in the real estate industry. It’s also creating new security challenges.
Take real estate wire fraud. In the past you could say, “Don’t change payment routing without my verbal confirmation, because email and other communication channel logins are so often compromised or spoofed.” Now AI allows a hacker to duplicate an agent’s voice and video image with a small sample, such as a voicemail introduction, a TikTok or YouTube video, or narrated video tour. The hacker can then leave their client a voicemail indistinguishable from one left by the agent, create a chatbot for a real-time audio call – or even fake an agent’s video call, confirming the fake message should be trusted. So, wire fraud mitigations will need to evolve to deal with the hacker capabilities made possible by AI.
More threats are coming based on confidential and personal information released by accident into public spaces by way of data leakage to generative AI tools. People are entering personal and work-related information into their prompts, all sorts of data is used to train the AI model, and right now there is not a lot of control over the use of that data. Even the privacy of AI use is not guaranteed and, the more hackers can learn about an individual, the more convincing their scams can be. If trained on dark web breached password troves, the easier it will be for AI to brute force poorly constructed passwords.
Generative AI can also be attacked by hackers – poisoning the model with bogus data to create biased or harmful output for end users, using model inversion to access or approximate training data, using prompt injection to get the AI to go beyond its guardrails – and so much more.
While AI creates security risks, mitigating these risks is high on many companies’ radar. AI also helps security professionals detect attacks and guess hackers’ next steps, create new AI-enabled security testing tools, and improve other security tools. We’ll just have to learn to use AI to defend the real estate industry better and faster than hackers learn to use them for attack.