Zoom woes: ‘Are you real?’ will soon replace ‘You’re on mute’

livemint.com:

Is the boss who’s giving you an order real or just realistic? Deepfakes are taking Zoom calls to another level of awkwardness, 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 to train office workers to spot phishing emails and resist the urge to click on dodgy attachments. Hackers and fraudsters often need just one person among hundreds to inadvertently download the malware needed to tunnel into a corporate network. With AI-powered video tools, they’re moving into territory we considered safe, underscoring how quickly deepfake technology has developed in just the past year.

While it sounds like science fiction, such elaborate frauds are now relatively easy to set up, ushering us into a new age of scepticism. The fraud in Hong Kong almost certainly used real-time deepfakes, meaning that the fake executive mirrored the scammer as they listened, talked and nodded during the meeting. According to David Maimon, a criminology professor at Georgia State University, online fraudsters have been using real-time deepfakes on video calls since at least last year for smaller-scale fraud including romance scams.