3 Deepfake Threats on the Rise – Are You Prepared?”

Kaspersky founded in 1997, is a global cybersecurity and digital privacy company. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection, specialized security products, and services, as well as Cyber Immune solutions.

To fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats, Kaspersky researchers shed light on the TOP 3 FRAUD SCHEMES USING DEEPFAKES. The number of deepfake videos online is increasing at an annual rate of 900% according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Users from all over the world can apply images, video, and audio materials using neural networks and deep learning (hence ‘deep fake’) to create realistic videos of a person. In these videos, their face or body is digitally altered to make them appear to be someone else. Malicious individuals frequently use these manipulated videos and images to spread false information.

FINANCIAL FRAUD

Criminals can use deepfakes for social engineering, enhancing images to impersonate celebrities and baiting victims into falling for their scams. Scammers use footage of celebrities or splice together old videos, and launch live streams on social media platforms, promising to double any cryptocurrency payment sent to them.

PORNOGRAPHIC DEEPFAKES 

Manipulators can create deepfake videos by manipulating a person’s face into a pornographic video, violating their privacy. In one case, deepfake videos of some celebrities surfaced online, showing their faces superimposed onto the bodies of pornographic actresses in explicit scenes. As a consequence, in such cases, the attack victims have their reputations harmed and their rights violated.

BUSINESS RISKS

deepfakes are used to targeting businesses for crimes such as extortion from company managers, blackmail, and industrial espionage. For instance, there is a known case where cybercriminals managed to deceive a bank manager in the UAE and steal $35 million, using a voice deepfake – just a small recording of an employee’s boss’s voice was enough to generate a convincing deepfake.

The number of deepfakes is increasing, it remains an expensive type of fraud that requires a big budget as these cybercriminals utilize huge amounts of data: photos, videos, and audio of the person they want to impersonate using different angles.

“One of the most serious threats that deepfake poses to business is not always the theft of corporate data. Sometimes reputational risks can have very severe consequences,” comments Dmitry Anikin, a senior security expert at Kaspersky

Kaspersky recommends the following to protect yourself from threats related to deepfakes:

• Check the cybersecurity practices in place in your organization – not only in the form of software but also in terms of developed IT skills. Use Kaspersky Threat Intelligence to get ahead of the current threat landscape.
• Boost the corporate “human firewall”: ensure the employees understand what deepfakes are, how they work, and the challenges they can pose. Have ongoing awareness and education drives on teaching employees how to spot a deepfake. Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform helps employees to stay up-to-date with the most recent threats and increases digital literacy levels.
• Use good quality news sources. Information illiteracy remains a crucial enabler for the proliferation of deepfakes.
• Maintain a skeptical attitude towards voicemail and video to avoid many of the most common traps.
• Be cautious of key characteristics of deepfake videos to look outfor: shifts in lighting, skin tone, strange blinking or no blinking, lips poorly synched with speech, digital artifacts on the image, video intentionally encoded down in quality, and poor lighting.

Staff writer