In March, the FBI released a report declaring that malicious actors almost certainly will leverage “synthetic content” for cyber and foreign influence operations in the next 12-18 months. This synthetic content includes deepfakes, audio or video that is either wholly created or altered by artificial intelligence or machine learning to convincingly misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.
We’ve all heard the story about the CEO whose voice was imitated convincingly enough to initiate a wire transfer of $243,000. Now, the constant Zoom meetings of the anywhere workforce era have created a wealth of audio and video data that can be fed into a machine learning system to create a compelling duplicate. And attackers have taken note. Deepfake technology has seen a drastic uptick across the dark web, and attacks are certainly taking place.