So what is Deepfake?
Deep fakes are, in their most common form, videos where one person’s face has been convincingly replaced by a computer-generated face, which often resembles a second person. In deep fakes, this means changing one person’s face into another’s, in ways a human editor might not think of or would be unable to detect. In some ways, there are a lot of benefits to the utilization of using computer-generated images/videos.
AI-generated avatars (Deepfake) have been used to protect the identity of interviewees in news reporters but create fake people during video calls. A perfect example would be the persecution of LGBTQ people in Russia.
Deepfake technology can also be used to create AI avatars for use in training videos. Startups like London-based Synthesia have been getting more attention from the corporate world during the COVID pandemic since lockdowns and health concerns have made video shoots involving real people much more difficult to pull off. However, just like any other tool, it can be misused.
In an extreme example, it can be used for nefarious purposes. Two years ago, fraudsters mimicked a company’s CEO using AI during a phone call, convincing an executive at the firm to wire $243,000 into a scam account. Using artificial intelligence (AI), cyber-criminals or fraudsters use deepfake technology to either impersonate the face or voice or both, of a person in order to carry out scams, fraud, and social engineering attacks.
Regardless of how you feel about Deepfake, It’s not going anywhere and in fact, you can expect hacker interest in deepfake technology to rise and will inevitably see deepfake attacks becoming a more utilized method for hackers in 2022.
