Fraud attempts and cyberattacks leveraging deepfake technology are on the rise, new research has claimed, adding that it’s high time for products and services that will help organizations defend themselves from these advanced identity theft (opens in new tab) attacks.
This is according to identity proofing experts ID R&D, which claims nearly half (42%) of organizations have already encountered deepfake attacks. At the same time, 37% already experienced injection attacks – incidents where threat actors bypass the camera or otherwise inject digital content into the data stream. In other words, deepfake technology can help bypass biometric authentication in some scenarios.
For more than half (51%), chatbot-enabled fraud is a “credible threat”.
Deepfake a growing concern
All of this understandably worries businesses, the researchers said. Nine in ten (91%) of organizations and their customers said to be worried about deepfake fraud, while 84% expressed similar worry when it comes to injection attacks.
Citing a Gartner report, ID R&D said that we can expect 20% of successful account takeover attacks this year to leverage deepfake technology.
Deepfake is an artificial intelligence-powered technology where users are able to create convincing videos of people. By feeding different videos and other content to the platform, the tool is then able to generate a unique video in which the individual being impersonated says and does things they never really did.
Its very first application was malicious, as people used it to add realistic faces of celebrities onto adult video content.
Other applications were more entertainment-oriented, as people started creating fake videos of Donald Trump saying all kinds of things (most of which he’d probably say anyway), among other things.
While entertaining, the videos were a great example of just how dangerous and damaging deepfake technology can be, and how important it is to have a solution that can make a distinction between a deepfake and an authentic video.
ID R&D built a solution called ID LIve Face Plus to do just that. Whether it does a good job or not, remains to be seen.
