AI was top of mind for the 20,000 hackers and other security professionals who attended the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas in August. Over the six days of the event, AI dominated the conversation — at the booths on the business hall floor, in the presentations about cutting-edge research and during the informal chats in between.

Discussions revolved around large language models, such as ChatGPT, which criminals are seeking to exploit through phishing, malware and other scams. Meanwhile, a growing number of companies are incorporating AI into their day-to-day business, pushing cybersecurity professionals to guard new frontiers in uncharted territory. Consumers are caught in the middle of this rapidly shifting terrain. 

Digital card skimming — a method for stealing card information by infecting e-commerce sites and apps with malware that harvests customers’ payment credentials — isn’t new, but it’s on the rise thanks to the mushrooming black market for hacked account data.

In addition, as the ubiquity of e-commerce and the growing popularity of peer-to-peer money transfers have created more entry points for scammers, AI is also giving cybercrime more economies of scale. Rather than manually trying numbers one at a time, scammers can deputize AI to process thousands of scams simultaneously — and get better with each try.

But the good guys have AI, too. Companies can scan 24/7 for red flags that indicate attacks are underway before personal information is compromised or malicious charges go through.

“What’s become more prevalent in the past two or three years is the speed and scale at which these attacks are occurring,” says Rigo Van den Broeck, executive vice president of Cybersecurity Solutions at Mastercard. “AI makes these things repeatable and automated — which is why we’re also using AI to proactively detect and disrupt these operations at scale and in real time, before they cause harm.”

Those texts and calls about unpaid tolls, great deals on vacations or a way out of debt just keep coming, and AI is partly to blame. Automated tools and AI-powered voice-cloning technology are making it quicker and easier for cybercriminals to send countless increasingly sophisticated scam messages.

To fight against these scams, both telecommunications and financial networks have developed sophisticated fraud prevention tools — but neither has enough data to track the full lifecycle of a scam on their own. So Mastercard teamed up with Deutsche Telekom and the GSMA telco industry group to share insights and fight threat actors from multiple angles. By uncovering new patterns in data, these organizations are making it possible to detect risky transactions much earlier.

“Fraudsters don't differentiate between data sources, so why should we?,” said Din Uppal, Mastercard’s global vertical lead for technology, media and telecoms. “If we’re going to win the fight against fraud and scams, it has to be a team effort.”

Looking ahead to 2026, we’ll see technology being deployed to constantly scan for new and evolving cyber threats, with AI continuously transforming how organizations defend against advanced threats. Recorded Future recently launched Autonomous Threat Operations, which hunts continuously for threats, eliminating any manual bottlenecks and automatically correlating third-party feeds to transform threat intelligence. Security systems will evolve into more sophisticated, layered and prevention-focused tools to take on a new generation of cyber threats.