

With deepfake technology enhancing it, there are speculations that these attacks can cause significant financial and reputational damages to an organization. However, these attacks are not to be taken lightly, primarily because social engineering within itself is one of the most dangerous and prevailing cyber attacks. So far, the deepfake social engineering attacks are not widespread, so it is hard to calculate the risk they pose fully. To make these emails look believable, threat actors carefully insert specific information, such as the amount of money requested, the company's name, address, and logo.ĭo Deepfake Social Engineering Attacks Emerge As a Serious Risk? The victim is entrapped into a sense of urgency as the threat actor dupes him into believing that the email is from a source of authority, for example, a CEO or head of a department. The reason why these attacks are successful is because they are designed explicitly with carefully gathered intel. Like a typical email phishing attack, the attacker exploits the victim's naivety by creating a sense of urgency to take immediate action. The attack features emails containing attachments or links for the target to open. The deepfake vishing attack has excellent potential for real-time conversations with the target and makes it challenging to detect any unusual activity.Īpart from that, the deepfake email phishing attack is another frightening reality. Using various advanced products, the threat agents can also select the age and gender of the targeted victim.

This is easy because a threat actor can use various online materials collected from phone calls, TED talks, corporate videos, interviews, speeches, and presentations. During this time, all the personal voice traits like tempo, pronunciation, pitch, and intonation necessary to create a real-time deepfake audio are fed into the algorithm.īesides this, deepfake audio also needs material from feeding training data and the sample audio using appropriate algorithms. The demonstration elaborates how a cloned voice could develop with source audio in only a few seconds. Its use has surfaced specifically within phishing, vishing, and spear-phishing attacks.Īpart from that, research shows that deepfake audio use increases the business email compromise (BEC) attacks. The deepfake social engineering attack has now become a reality. How do Cyber Criminals use Deepfake technology in Launching Social Engineering Attacks? Its use is evident in several malicious purposes, such as spreading wrong information, financial fraud, identity theft, and even social-engineering attacks. The primary purpose behind the deepfake videos/pictures is to damage the reputation of famous personalities or dismantle misinformation. Threat actors use deepfake technology to replace the image or voice of a specific person's speech to exploit the information and manipulate the targeted audience. Since these modern cyber attacks are much more sophisticated, they are significantly harder to mitigate and alarmingly have a better success rate.

As warned by the FBI in March 2021, the recent emergence of social engineering attacks exploiting deepfake technology is one example of the growing exploitation of technological developments. Cybercrime has long since evolved from the traditional cyber attack methods with the integration of modern technology.
