Leyla Bilge, the director of scam research labs at Gen, wants to dig into your spam messages

You’ve got spam. And Leyla Bilge, the director of scam research labs at Gen, wants to dig in. She and her team see around a thousand unique scam messages a week, which doesn’t even include the vast amount of scam emails that millions of Gen’s clients receive.

Gen Digital is home to brands like Norton, Avast, and LifeLock—companies responsible for services used by almost 500 million users around the globe. One of the latest rollouts is Norton’s Genie—a free AI-powered digital assistant that helps users detect scam.

Bilge sat down with IT Brew to talk about scams and how the landscape has shifted from infamous email scams to more modern social media and AI-based ones.

On her day-to-day routine at Gen

Passionate about proactive security, she and her team are involved in helping people before, during, and after scams occur, offering social media and privacy monitoring, among other services. She and her team also have automatic systems in place to help flag fake shopping sites that are actually malicious.

Sometimes she and her team will take things old school and label suspicious content by hand. “And we basically sit together and we start labeling and checking things…so, you can actually do a team-building activity, labeling phishing pages,” she said with a laugh, noting that it can lead to some awkward moments as they pore over the messages.

On scammers leaving breadcrumbs

Attackers or scammers may leave a lot of artifacts behind, which can be useful to detect, she says. “We are trying to design our systems based on the tactics used. For example, there’s urgency in the message. Normally, the bank will never tell you in one hour, you have to transfer 200,000 euros or something—that’s not going to happen, right?…They try to block you from thinking.”

Even if it’s not a scam that involves money, Bilge said, users feel the psychological effects that accompany. “So, I started seeing a lot of people around me [that were] impacted from scams, and I saw the psychological impact of scams as well. It’s not just getting malware and your computer crashes, and OK—whatever, right? You really feel like you were deceived.”

On the changing landscape of scams

Phishing remains one of the biggest scams she and her team observe, but, still, she says scammers go where the people are, largely targeting users on various social media platforms.

Over the last five to six years, she and her team have realized that, especially with the introduction of large language models (LLMs), it’s “very easy for attackers or scammers to actually deceive people.” The pandemic played a key role, she noted, as bad actors took advantage of people who started living lives that were “much more online.”

On scams in 2024

“AI-based scams will increase and…there are many tools out there. It’s so easy for people to generate things and make it realistic,” she said. “In general, to be able to measure it, you have to have a solution.”

“I like working on this—trying to figure out how AI is actually misused by cyber criminals and what we can do to combat [it],” Bilge added.