Stay informed with the latest on Deepfakes: explore news, trends, and insights into how AI-generated fakes impact information security.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Deepfake technology uses artificial intelligence to create realistic but fabricated audio or video that depicts people saying or doing things they never did. This synthetic media can convincingly mimic voices and faces, making it difficult to distinguish genuine content from manipulated material. The technology relies on machine learning models trained on large datasets of real images and sounds to generate these forgeries.
In information security, deepfakes pose risks such as enabling sophisticated social engineering attacks where attackers impersonate trusted individuals to extract sensitive information or authorize fraudulent transactions. They also threaten biometric authentication systems that use facial or voice recognition, potentially allowing unauthorized access. Defending against deepfake threats involves deploying detection tools that analyze inconsistencies in media, implementing multi-factor authentication beyond biometrics, and training users to verify unusual requests through independent channels.
OWASP released guidance materials addressing how to respond to deepfakes, AI security best practices, and how to secure open source and commercial generative AI applications.
Despite the absence of laws specifically covering AI-based attacks, regulators can use existing rules around fraud and deceptive business practices.
In the final weeks before November’s U.S. election, cybersecurity experts were calling October 2024 the “month of mischief”—a magnet for bad actors looking to disrupt the democratic process through AI-generated misinformation. This issue of AI Pulse looks at what can be done about deepfakes and other AI scams, and why defense-in-depth is the only way to go.
Academics Build AI Agent With OpenAI to Execute Phone Scams at ScaleHackers can use OpenAI's real-time voice API to carry out for less than a dollar deepfake scams involving voice impersonations of government officials or bank employees to swindle victims, said researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.