Source: Storyblocks
Security researchers have caught hackers using v0, a generative AI tool from cloud application firm Vercel to design increasingly accurate phishing pages. v0 lets users create simple landing pages and even full-stack apps using natural language prompts.
The exploitation was caught by security researchers at Okta. A report into these activities claims that hackers have already been able to successfully create convincing replicas of legitimate landing pages for various brands, including one Okta customer. The phishing pages have been reported to Vercel and have been taken down since.
Additional content related to the pages, such as logos of the impersonated company are also being stored in Vercel’s cloud infrastructure. This likely helps trick unsuspecting users and even some developers to trust the page, especially considering how popular Vercel’s services are in the developer community.
The phishing pages themselves aren’t very different from traditionally coded ones. The main difference here is the ease and technical knowledge required to build a page. With tools like v0, hackers, scammers, and all sorts of other threat actors can set up entire phishing websites that can be visually indistinguishable from legitimate sites by simply entering natural language prompts.
V0 and its many open-source alternatives that are freely available on GitHub give low-skill hackers and scammers an easy way to set up complicated web infrastructure that would otherwise require time, effort, and some degree of web development skill. This can likely increase the number of phishing attacks, while also making them easier to create and more likely to succeed.
Additionally, AI-created deepfakes, fake emails, cloned voices, and more are all a result of hackers quickly leveraging generative AI models and finding new, malicious use cases for them. While running a large-scale phishing or hacking campaign previously took significant workforce and skill, it can now be done by a handful of individuals working with a generative AI model to quickly scale and even automate entire campaigns.
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