Cyber Crime

DeepFakes Are The Cybercriminal Economy’s Latest Business Line

California-based Resecurity has identified a new spike of underground services enabling bad actors to generate deepfakes.

According to cybersecurity experts, this may be used for political propaganda, foreign influence activity, disinformation, scams, and fraud. 

Introduced by Canadian researchers to the public in 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), typically imitate people’s faces, speech, and unique facial gestures, they have become known to online communities as DeepFakes.

One of the recently identified underground services – “RealDeepFake”, readily available through Telegram groups. For a small fee, the service allows actors to create a deepfake instance with their selected character which they then apply a voice over from a chosen script, they can also include effects and text. The service leverages technologies such as VoiceR and Lipsing to change the voice so it sounds like the chosen character.

Examples of these DeepFakes include the impersonation of celebrities such as Elon Musk, Snoop Dog, Donald Trump, and The Rock. The scammers are also using DeepFakes to credibly impersonate C-Suite executives in video chats or phone calls to issue fraudulent wire transfer instructions to their colleagues and personnel.

The accelerating rise of deepfake BEC and Phishing Frauds targeting the Web3 community comes amidst the backdrop of Federal Trade Commission reports that American consumers have lost over $1 billion in crypto because of scams since the start of 2021. The experts highlight deepfakes will be likely used by bad actors to provide misleading information about cryptocurrency, as well as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), using profiles of celebrities.

Resecurity expects to see more hybrid attacks that combine convincing email and social media blasts, fraudulent mints, and expertly rendered deepfakes of high-profile Web3 influencers to deceive both everyday consumers and crypto professionals alike.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Deepfakes)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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