The Guardian reports:
Rogue French fridges were an unlikely talking point for the world’s leading economists, central bankers and finance chiefs meeting in a sultry Bangkok last week – helping to underline the spiralling cost of cyber-attacks.
Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, seized on news that supermarket chains across France had to chuck out piles of spoiled food after hackers accessed their fridge controls and turned up the temperature to 50C.
Speaking at the fund’s annual meetings in the Thai capital, she was keen to hammer home the importance of guarding against “bad actors” in a rapidly changing, interconnected world – especially now that AI was “putting the potential of digital fraud on steroids”.
Policymakers have been warning for some time that the AI boom could at some point threaten financial stability via a share price crash – a “correction”, as it is euphemistically called.
But a different, related threat came into sharp focus in Bangkok. Georgieva said she was concerned that cybercrime, turbocharged by AI, could undermine trust in the financial system altogether.
Read more at The Guardian.
