On Zoom, ‘You’re on Mute’ Is Now ‘Are You Real?’
Scammers used AI to disguise themselves on a video conference and swipe $25 million. Here’s how to avoid the same fate.
Deepfakes are everywhere.
Photographer: OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFPIs the boss who’s giving you an order real or just realistic? Deepfakes are now taking Zoom calls to another level of awkwardness, by making us question whether our co-workers are genuine. A finance worker in Hong Kong transferred more than $25 million to scammers after they posed as his chief financial officer and other colleagues on a video conference call, marking perhaps the biggest known corporate fraud using deepfake technology to date. The worker had been suspicious about an email requesting a secret transaction, but the scammers looked and sounded so convincing on the call that he sent the money.
Corporate IT managers have spent more than a decade trying, often fruitlessly, to train office workers to spot phishing emails and resist the urge to click on dodgy attachments. Often hackers and fraudsters need just one person out of hundreds to inadvertently download the malware needed to tunnel into a corporate network. With AI-powered video tools, they’re moving into territory we have considered safe, underscoring how quickly deepfake technology has developed in just the last year. While it sounds like science fiction, such elaborate frauds are now relatively easy to set up, ushering us into a new age of skepticism.