CYBER SECURITY
Faking it: Deepfake crime exposing cyber security ER COAV TURE FE
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yber security experts share their insight into how
businesses can protect themselves against a growing risk. Deepfakes are exposing businesses’ cyber security skills gaps. Deepfake crime is a real and present danger for businesses. Last year, it cost one bank alone $35 million in a single scam, yet many businesses are still ignoring the risks, partly thanks to a lack of cyber security skills at leadership level. With Deepfake technology becoming more sophisticated – and readily available to criminals – businesses need to see the technology as a current threat and not a future concern. Here, cyber security professionals based in the UK and Singapore, look at the steps that every business needs to take now to protect themselves against Deepfake intrusions before it’s too late.
Understanding the Deepfake threat Unlike established cyber-security threats – eg malware, SQL injections and database hacking – Deepfakes are still easy to dismiss from cyber security strategies. A relatively new technology, their introduction as a fun, viral video phenomenon hasn’t helped businesses to realise the severity of the threat they now pose to security. Yet several high-profile cases have emerged in recent years that
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illustrate just how dangerous Deepfake can be. In 2019, a UK-based CEO was conned into transferring $243,000 to a malicious actor, thanks to advanced Deepfake voice technology convincing them that they were speaking to their parent company’s chief executive. Different types of Deepfake known to be used against businesses currently include ghost fraud (where the criminal steals a deceased person’s identity), identity imitation (like the examples above), new account fraud, and virtual identity fraud (where criminals ‘create’ a new identity by combining information and images from multiple people). Highlighting growing concerns at government level, the FBI last year released a stark warning of the dangers of Deepfake in a six-page report, while the UAE’s National Programme for Artificial Intelligence and the Council for Digital Wellbeing issued guidance to raise public awareness of the security threat.
How cyber security teams need to respond to Deepfake While technology is at the fore-front of most businesses fight against cyber crime, there is no software or system that businesses can ‘buy-in’ to seal their business against Deepfake threats. While they are a cyber security concern, their success currently relies on ‘human error’: namely, using
