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The email looked perfect.
It came from the CFO's actual email address. The writing style matched exactly—same tone, same phrases he always used. It referenced a project only the finance team knew about. The urgency felt real but not suspicious.
The accounting manager wired $280,000 to what she thought was a new vendor account.
The first issue: By the time they realized something was wrong, the money was gone. Worse, they couldn't figure out how the attacker knew so much. The CFO's email wasn't compromised. His password hadn't been breached. No malware was found.
What they did: They immediately implemented stricter wire transfer approval processes. Two-person verification. Manager sign-off required. They thought they'd solved it.
How they made it worse: Three weeks later, the head of HR received a "voice message" from the CEO asking her to expedite a salary advance for a remote employee. The voice was perfect—right accent, speech patterns, even the CEO's signature phrases. She processed it immediately.
Another $45,000 gone.
The second issue: That's when they discovered the truth. Attackers had been scraping their executives' LinkedIn posts, earnings call transcripts, and conference presentations. They'd fed everything into AI models that could generate emails and voice messages indistinguishable from the real executives.
Traditional phishing training was useless. These weren't generic scam emails with poor grammar. These were AI-generated messages with perfect personalization, correct context, and authentic communication styles.
What they did: They spent four months implementing AI-aware security controls, training staff to verify requests through separate channels, and building detection systems for AI-generated content. They never recovered the money.
This was a real incident, and not nearly the only one of its kind.
According to Arctic Wolf's 2025 Trends Report, 29% of security leaders now cite AI/LLMs as their top concern—surpassing ransomware (21%) for the first time. AI-generated attacks are becoming the primary threat because they're scalable, convincing, and bypass traditional defenses.
The security team in this story had strong email security. Good phishing awareness training. Solid policies. But none of it addressed AI-specific threats—because traditional security training doesn't cover how attackers weaponize AI, how to detect AI-generated content, or how to build defenses against these attacks.
That's the gap AAISM fills. You learn AI-specific attack vectors like these. AI security governance frameworks to prevent them. And how to manage AI risks throughout your organization—before attackers exploit the gaps in your traditional defenses.
AAISM is the only certification of its kind—meant for security professionals, not developers or researchers.
The question is: do you learn this before or after the wire transfer?
Our AAISM bootcamp starts December 1.
Stay secure,
The DestCert Team
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