A recent Bitdefender study revealed that Singapore witnessed the third highest rise in AI-driven attacks on organisations across countries globally during the last 12 months, with more than half of security professionals being told to keep a breach confidential, even when they believed it should be reported to authorities.
Against this alarming backdrop of quiet silence, and with business email compromise (BEC), where attackers impersonate trusted individuals or organisations, rising as an attack surface, what can we do to mitigate the new reality where adversaries are using AI to exploit vulnerabilities, sharpening their social engineering, and accelerating the speed of attacks.
iTNews Asia speaks with Paul Hadjy, Bitdefender’s Vice President of APAC and Cybersecurity Services, to hear his recommendations on how best organisations in Singapore can build proactive strategies and stay protected.
iTNews Asia: What are the reasons for the rise in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks? How much can they be attributed to a lack of awareness or complacency? Are some organisations unprepared and unable to distinguish AI-led attacks?
BEC attacks are rising due to a mix of complacency, low awareness, and growing use of AI by cybercriminals. Many organisations overestimate their cyber readiness, leaving gaps in vigilance, with attackers now using widely available Large Language Model (LLM) and deepfake-type tools to craft convincing phishing emails in any language or clone voices, making it harder to detect fraud.
Our recent 2025 survey of more than 1,200 security professionals globally, including Singapore, found a disconnect between executive confidence and frontline security realities, combined with an underinvestment in proactive defence strategies and pressures to conceal breaches, often resulting in delays in appropriate responses.
These factors are creating an environment where BEC-type attacks can thrive unless organisations shift towards more AI-resilient and proactive security approaches, like training and red-teaming exercises, to help prepare the team and staff.
iTNews Asia: How are cybercriminals evolving their attacks?
Cybercriminals are evolving their attacks by increasingly using “Living off the Land” (LOTL) techniques, which involve leveraging legitimate system tools like PowerShell and reg.exe (already present in the environment) for malicious purposes. This approach enables them to operate stealthily, bypass traditional security measures, and blend into normal network activity.
In an analysis of 700,000 security incidents, we found that more than four out of five incidents, or 84 percent of attacks now include LOTL tactics. Because these tools are commonly used by administrators, their misuse can go undetected without advanced monitoring and a proactive approach for reducing the attack surface.
Additionally, threat actors are becoming much faster at exploiting vulnerabilities in edge devices. When a new vulnerability is found in a popular platform or device, organisations have hours to patch, not days.
iTNews Asia: What can security professionals do to mitigate and stop them?
These evolving tactics demand behaviour-based, real-time threat detection to stay ahead. We advocate for proactive security measures, such as our GravityZone PHASR (Proactive Hardening and Attack Surface Reduction) solution, which reduces exposure by detecting malicious use of trusted applications and tools.
Organisations should prioritise reducing their attack surface by disabling or restricting the capabilities of tools and applications, tightening user privileges, and regularly auditing admin accounts. Implementing endpoint security solutions like extended detection and response (XDR) with human oversight helps ensure that suspicious activity is not just logged but actively investigated and correlated with daily operations.
Continuous staff training to recognise phishing and social engineering tactics, along with red teaming exercises, also plays a critical role.
Ultimately, effective mitigation requires a layered defence strategy that combines automation, threat intelligence, and skilled human analysis to disrupt attacks before they escalate.
iTNews Asia: How critical is the need for automation tools, and what challenges do they solve?
Automation tools are becoming critical in cybersecurity as organisations face mounting challenges from complex, fast-evolving threats and overstretched internal teams.
According to our Cybersecurity Assessment Report, many organisations are struggling with alert fatigue, skills shortages, and misaligning their priorities between their executive level and frontline teams.
- Paul Hadjy, Vice President of APAC and Cybersecurity Services, Bitdefender
Automation helps address these issues by eliminating manual bottlenecks, accelerating detection and response times, and reducing the cognitive load on analysts. Integrating XDR tools helps correlate threat signals across environments and consolidate alerts into coherent incident stories, helping analysts cut through noise and act quickly. Automation also enables scalable threat hunting and continuous monitoring, ensuring threats are identified before they cause harm.
iTNews Asia: What advice can you give to organisations when responding to the new scourge of AI-enabled cyberattacks?
To respond effectively to AI-enabled cyberattacks, organisations must adopt equally intelligent, adaptive defence strategies. There is now a widening gap between AI’s offensive use by attackers and the defensive readiness of many organisations.
The key is to leverage AI not just for detection, but as an anticipatory defence mechanism — one that identifies patterns, predicts attacker behaviour, and adapts in real-time.
Security teams should integrate AI-driven analytics with human oversight to ensure contextualised, actionable responses. Incident response plans must evolve to address the speed and sophistication of AI threats, incorporating regular training, red teaming exercises, and simulations that stress-test defences against synthetic social engineering and deepfake-driven compromise scenarios. Together, these efforts will significantly improve an organisation’s posture and readiness.
