Infrastructure Engineer

AI-Powered 'vishing' attacks reportedly targeted top hedge funds. Turns out rogue AI isn't the only cybersecurity threat to be worried about. By Webb Wright Published August 5, 2026, 3:39 pm ET Reading time 2 minutes Amid all the recent reports of AI systems autonomously going off the rails and hacking into third-party organizations, it's almost easy to forget that human hackers are still out there, experimenting with AI in all kinds of nefarious ways. A new report from Bloomberg, however, is a reminder of just how quickly AI-enabled cybercrime is evolving - and how unprepared the world is to deal with it. According to the report, a litany of high-profile hedge funds, including Citadel and Two Sigma, were targeted by recent voice phishing, or "vishing," attacks, in which AI is used to simulate the voices of actual humans in an attempt to skirt security systems. Several private equity firms were also reportedly targeted. Two Sigma told Bloomberg it caught the attack in time before any of its internal systems were compromised. Citadel declined Gizmodo's request for comment. Point72, another hedge fund included in the attack, did not immediately respond to a comment request. IT experts have been warning for years that the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use AI tools that mimic human speech or generate other kinds of deepfake content will escalate both the severity of scam attempts and the rate at which they occur. The world got a taste of this in 2024, when an employee at the Hong Kong branch of a multinational company was duped into wiring more than $25.5 million to scammers who had instructed her to do so using AI-generated deepfakes of company employees, including its chief financial officer. AI scams are also being deployed to tip political scales. Last summer, for example, someone (or a group of people working together) used AI to recreate the voice of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then sent voice messages to foreign diplomats and federal officials. OpenAI also said in a June report that a fleet of scammers, all of whom appear to have been backed by the Chinese government, had been illicitly using ChatGPT to generate inflammatory social media content aimed at fueling Americans' resentment towards data centers, the power cells of the United States' AI industry. All the while, the market pressures of the AI race - combined with a total lack of federal regulation - have been pushing tech developers to build increasingly capable models, including ones designed to imitate human speech. (Such tools are often promoted as "companions" that can alleviate loneliness, even though research has indicated they can sometimes have the opposite effect.) OpenAI's latest voice model, GPT-Live-1, is engineered to imitate subtle nuances of human speech, and, in theory, make interacting with AI feel less awkwardly mechanical. By design, OpenAI's model cannot imitate the voices of real people; that was a lesson OpenAI had to learn the hard way after it received earlier public blowback for releasing a voice model that, to many people's ears, sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. This is all to say: Nobody should be surprised that vishing attacks are on the rise. Technologically-enabled scam artistry is a tale as old as time, and AI is arguably the most enabling tool ever invented in that regard. The real mystery is why more isn't being done to build actually effective safeguards into AI systems to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Point72, Citadel among hedge funds hit by AI vishing attacks. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. Photo by: Paul Elledge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Hackers used AI voice cloning to target Point72, Citadel, Millennium and other major money managers on Wall Street. AUG 05, 2026 Point72 Asset Management, Millennium Management, Two Sigma Investments, and Citadel were all targeted in a coordinated wave of cyberattacks in recent days, with attackers using AI-powered voice phishing to attempt to extract sensitive data from employees of the Wall Street money managers. According to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday, Point72 informed investors it had been attacked, though the firm's initial review found no client information was stolen. The firm told investors it was still reviewing the incident. Spokespeople for Millennium, Point72, and Citadel declined to comment to Bloomberg. Two Sigma, which manages $75 billion in assets, told Bloomberg it successfully blocked the attempt. The voice fraud is known as "vishing" in cybersecurity terms. "Our security team responded quickly to an attempted vishing campaign targeting Two Sigma and other investment managers, and we have no indication of any impact to our data or our systems," a Two Sigma spokesperson said in a statement. "We continue to monitor the situation closely." Vishing attacks use technology to clone or mimic voices in phone calls, tricking employees into surrendering credentials or granting system access. FINRA has been in contact with member firms about the attempted breaches, according to a person with knowledge of the matter cited by Bloomberg. The regulator launched its Financial Intelligence Fusion Center in March 2026, a secure portal designed to help member firms share fraud threat intelligence and coordinate responses. Several private equity firms were also targeted as part of the same assault, Bloomberg reported. AI lowers the cost of attack The incidents reflect a broader shift in the threat landscape confronting financial services firms. Vinod Paul, president of Align Managed Services, a cybersecurity and IT firm specializing in hedge fund clients, told Bloomberg that AI tools have dramatically lowered the barrier to launching large-scale targeted attacks. "Before they could attack 50 entities in a targeted attack, now they can do 1,000," Paul said. "Hackers can also listen into a phone call and mimic the voice, tone and phrasings of the speakers to create fake calls." Will Wilson, chief executive of Antithesis - a software firm backed by Jane Street - told Bloomberg the AI has restructured cyber attacks. "The terrifying thing about modern-day AI systems is that they have commoditized this and made it possible to execute attacks at scale," Wilson said. "Everybody will have to seriously level up. Otherwise they are going to be in big trouble." In June 2026, Google's cybersecurity unit published a blog post flagging a similar vishing wave targeting law firms and professional services companies, in some cases involving individuals who physically entered corporate offices posing as IT workers. The recent attack on hedge funds unfolded as US authorities were also working to contain separate cyberattacks on water systems in several states, though officials have not confirmed any connection between the two. The attacks add to a string of cybersecurity incidents hitting wealth management and financial advice firms this year. Cyberattacks on RIAs have accelerated throughout 2026 with AI-powered social engineering targeting advisory firms of all sizes. Mega-RIA Mariner recently disclosed a cloud breach impacting nearly 9,000 individuals, and Mercer has faced class action litigation following a separate breach linked to the ShinyHunters attack group earlier this year. Firms targeted in cyber attacks this year have also included Hightower Advisors, Edelman Financial Engines, Beacon Pointe, CW Advisors, Betterment, Pathstone, EP Wealth, Cetera and Ameriprise.

Why finance pros who skip AI news are falling behind. July 27, 2026 A portfolio manager at a mid-tier hedge fund recently lost a major client - not because of bad returns, but because a competing firm deployed an AI-driven risk model that delivered real-time scenario analysis the client had been asking about for months. The losing manager had heard about the tool in passing but never followed up. That single gap in awareness cost the firm an eight-figure relationship. This isn't hypothetical. It's the kind of story playing out across finance every week, and it underscores a brutal truth: skipping the AI news isn't just an oversight - it's a competitive liability. The AI revolution in finance is accelerating, not slowing down. Artificial intelligence finance isn't a future trend; it's the present operating environment. JPMorgan's COiN platform has been parsing commercial loan agreements since 2017, but the 2025-2026 generation of tools makes that look quaint. Bloomberg's BloombergGPT, trained on decades of financial data, now powers research workflows at hundreds of institutional desks. Morgan Stanley's AI assistant - built on OpenAI's GPT-4 architecture - helps 16,000 financial advisors surface insights from a library of over 100,000 research reports in seconds. Meanwhile, firms like Citadel and Two Sigma are investing hundreds of millions annually in machine learning infrastructure. The gap between AI-forward firms and everyone else is widening at an exponential rate. If you're not tracking AI news for finances on at least a weekly basis, you're making decisions with an incomplete map of the landscape. What you don't know is already costing you. Consider the tangible consequences of falling behind. Regulatory bodies are moving fast: the SEC proposed new guidelines in late 2025 around AI-generated investment advice and algorithmic trading disclosures. The EU's AI Act, now in enforcement, directly impacts any firm operating across borders. If you missed these developments, your compliance team is already playing catch-up - and the fines for non-compliance aren't trivial. On the operational side, AI tools for finances 2026 are reshaping everything from fraud detection to credit underwriting. Mastercard's Decision Intelligence platform uses generative AI to evaluate transaction legitimacy in under 50 milliseconds, reducing false declines by up to 20%. Upstart's AI lending models approve 27% more borrowers than traditional methods while delivering lower default rates. These aren't marginal improvements - they're structural advantages that compound over time. If your competitors are deploying these tools and you don't even know they exist, you're not just behind on technology. You're behind on strategy, pricing, risk management, and client experience simultaneously. The knowledge gap is widening fast. Here's what makes the problem especially dangerous: AI in finance isn't one story. It's dozens of stories unfolding in parallel across specialties. A CFO needs to understand how AI is transforming forecasting and FP&A. A compliance officer needs to track regulatory AI frameworks. A quantitative analyst needs to monitor breakthroughs in reinforcement learning and alternative data. A wealth advisor needs to know which client-facing AI tools are gaining traction. No single publication covers all of these angles with the depth finance professionals need. General tech news buries finance-specific AI developments under layers of consumer gadget coverage and Silicon Valley gossip. Finance trade publications often cover AI as an afterthought. The result is that staying genuinely informed requires cobbling together insights from a dozen sources - a process that can eat hours every week. * Missed tool launches: New AI platforms for financial modeling, like Runway Financial's AI-assisted forecasting, ship quarterly with features that directly affect how you build projections. * Regulatory blind spots: AI governance rules are evolving across the US, EU, and Asia-Pacific simultaneously, with material implications for cross-border operations. * Talent competition: Firms that demonstrate AI fluency attract stronger candidates. A 2025 Deloitte survey found that 74% of finance professionals under 35 rank "AI-forward culture" as a top-three factor when choosing employers. * Client expectations: Institutional and retail clients alike now ask about AI capabilities during due diligence. Not having answers erodes trust fast. Staying informed doesn't require becoming a data scientist. There's a common misconception that keeping up with artificial intelligence finance means you need to understand transformer architectures or write Python scripts. You don't. What you need is situational awareness - a clear, concise picture of which tools are gaining adoption, which regulations are shifting, and which strategies your peers and competitors are pursuing. The most effective finance professionals in 2026 aren't necessarily the most technical. They're the most informed. They know that Stripe launched an AI-powered revenue recognition tool three weeks before their competitors scrambled to evaluate it. They know that the OCC issued updated guidance on AI model risk management before the compliance deadline, not after. They read the right signal and filter out the noise. Build the habit before the gap becomes permanent. The difference between leading and lagging in finance has always come down to information asymmetry. AI is creating a new layer of that asymmetry - one where the advantage goes to professionals who treat AI news for finances as essential intelligence, not optional reading. The compounding nature of AI adoption means that every quarter you delay, the catch-up cost grows steeper. That's exactly why tools like Aivly.io exist. Aivly delivers a daily AI news digest filtered specifically for your profession, so you get the finance-relevant developments - new AI tools for finances 2026, regulatory updates, competitive moves - without spending hours sifting through generic tech coverage. It takes less than five minutes a day, and it ensures you never lose a client, miss a regulation, or fall behind a competitor because of a story you didn't see. The smartest move in finance right now isn't just adopting AI - it's making sure you never stop paying attention to it. Stay ahead of the AI curve Aivly delivers daily AI news filtered for Finances - no noise, just signal.