The Psychology of a Fraud Enabler: AI Re-Equipped an Old Adversary, It Did Not Create a New One
Cybersecurity gets treated as a technology problem. The attacks are technical, the defenses are technical and the vendor language is technical. Every attack, though, starts with a person deciding to act. This quarter KasadaIQ built a model for that decision and applied it to a live adversary community, to see what AI is actually changing about the people behind the tooling.
The model is the Fraud Enabler Diamond. It adapts more than 70 years of fraud research, starting with Donald Cressey's 1953 study of why people commit fraud, into a frame for a different kind of actor: the external operator who does not commit the fraud but builds and sells the capability that lets others do it. Their relationship to the victim is commercial supply rather than betrayed trust, so the classic models needed reframing. The Diamond has four elements: motivation, opportunity, capability, and rationalization.
