Police flag the use of AI by criminals

The number of these kinds of cases rose by 18 percent year-on-year to 40 during the period. Despite this, there was an overall dip of 12 percent in the number of tech crimes to 21,573 cases, along with a 15 percent drop in total losses that stood at almost HK$3.9 billion. Chief Superintendent Raymond Lam from the Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau noted that agentic AI – autonomous AI systems that execute tasks with minimal human supervision – was widely adopted by criminals to path the attack kill chains in order to carry out hack attacks.

"They may be used in that kind of cyberattack, like system scanning, vulnerability scanning, penetration, etc," he said.

"Indeed, we understand that the use of AI, they obviously increased the speed of attack, the volume, and the intrusiveness, so that the attack will be more effective." Police officials believe criminals have scaled up their reconnaissance and phishing attacks before initiating ransomware attacks using AI.

The growing trend highlighted the importance of Hong Kong police collaborating with both mainland authorities and Interpol, as the rapid evolution of AI poses a challenge to law enforcement. To meet the challenge, the SAR joined Interpol’s first year-long AI-powered cyber operation targeting potential phishing and fraudulent links. Using an AI-analysis engine, created by Hong Kong police, which can analyse a website’s features, such as its domain and the technical infrastructure, officers can take down or block sites that are deemed risky, before the links reach more people.

Enrique Hernandez-Gonzalez, Assistant Director of Cybercrime Operations at Interpol’s Cybercrime Directorate said such intelligence was shared with 47 jurisdictions. As a result, among the roughly 57,000 links that were investigated in the campaign, about 90 percent of them have become inaccessible. “Hong Kong has information about malicious domains or victims that may be located in other countries,” he said.

“Using Interpol’s channel, we put that information in the outlets of these countries, so they can take action.” The second phase of the operation – featuring the involvement of more than 20 jurisdictions across five continents – was launched last month.