Security News > 2021 > May > Deepfake Attacks Are About to Surge, Experts Warn

Cybercriminals are increasingly sharing, developing and deploying deepfake technologies to bypass biometric security protections, and in crimes including blackmail, identity theft, social engineering-based attacks and more, experts warn.

A drastic uptick in deepfake technology and service offerings across the Dark Web is the first sign a new wave of fraud is just about to crash in, according to a new report from Recorded Future, which ominously predicted that deepfakes are on the rise among threat actors with an enormous range of goals and interests.

The researchers said, discussions among threat actors about deepfake products and technologies are largely concentrated in English- and Russian-language criminal forums, but related topics were also observed on Turkish-, Spanish- and Chinese-language forums.

"The most common deepfake-related topics on dark web forums included services, how-to methods and lessons, requests for best practices, sharing free software downloads and photo generators, general interests in deepfakes, and announcements on advancements in deepfake technologies," the report added.

"There is a strong clearnet presence and interest in deepfake technology, consisting of open-source deepfake tools, dedicated forums, and discussions on popular messenger applications such as Telegram and Discord."

Last summer, FireEye used the Black Hat USA 2020 event to warn the audience about how widely available open-source deepfake tools are with pre-trained natural language processing, computer vision and speech recognition - just about everything a threat actor might need to develop what they called malicious "Synthetic media." FireEye's staff scientist Philip Tully said at the time that the world was in the "Calm before the storm."

News URL

https://threatpost.com/deepfake-attacks-surge-experts-warn/165798/