According to John Scheier, senior security advisor at cybersecurity firm Sophos, fraudsters will never need to use deep spoofing on a large scale because there are other, more effective methods of getting people to give up personal information and payment details.
Talking to Register (opens in a new tab)Schaer said deepfakes aren’t that popular with scammers, mostly because they’re not needed.
“The thing about deep fakes is that we don’t see a lot of them,” he said. “People will give up information if you just ask nicely.”
Deepfakes in the future
In simple terms, deep fakes are videos that use artificial intelligence to create authentic videos of people saying what was actually coded by a programmer.
Fraudsters often use this technology identity theft. In 2018, researchers highlighting the dangers of deepfakes used the technology to steal the identity of former US President Barack Obama and spread the hoax over the internet.
Deep fakes may be overkill for some types of scams, but Shier believes that romance scams (in which the scammer gets close to their victim online to get them to send money his way) could make good use of the technology, as the videos would lend an inherent credibility Internet person.
However, Schaer believes that we are not seeing the maximum impact that deepfakes can have on socially engineered fraud in the future, and that we should still be wary of deepfakes being used by organized crime.
“Artificial intelligence experts say that large-scale impact is several years away,” he said. “In between we will see well-resourced criminal gangs perform the next level of compromise to get people to transfer funds to accounts.”
Scheer isn’t the only security researcher concerned about deep fakes. Eric Horwitz, Microsoft’s Chief Scientist, discussed the idea of the widespread use of deepfake in fraud cases in an academic study paper published last month under the title On the Horizon: Interactive and Compositional Forgeries.
In the article, Horwitz suggests that in the near future, we won’t be sure if the person we’re talking to during a video call is real or an imposter, because deepfake technology has become easier to obtain and use.
“Today, open-source toolkits are available to create deepfakes, lowering the bar of expertise needed to create and share them in a flash on social media. We can expect that deepfakes will become difficult to distinguish from the real thing.”
While deep spoofing may not be as common these days, it’s clear that fraudsters are still looking to use this technology to catch their victims online.
The ubiquitous nature of the internet means that anyone can become a victim, and this is worrying.
https://www.techradar.com/news/phishing-works-so-well-that-cybercriminals-dont-need-deepfakes/
