Security News > 2023 > February > Novel face swaps emerge as a major threat to biometric security

As biometric face verification gains traction and becomes more widely adopted, threat actors are targeting all systems with sophisticated online attacks.

To achieve both user friendliness and security, organizations need to evaluate their biometric solutions for resilience in the face of these complex attacks.

Digital injection attacks - where a malicious actor bypasses a camera feed to trick a system with synthetic imagery and video recordings - occurred five times more frequently than persistent presentation attacks on web in 2022.

"The 149% increase in attacks using emulators posing as mobile devices is a good example of how attack vectors arrive and scale very quickly. We have seen a rapid proliferation of low-cost, easy-to-use tools that has allowed threat actors to launch advanced, scalable attacks with limited technical skill."

2022 also saw the first use of a new type of synthetic digital attack - novel face swaps - which combine existing video or live streams and superimpose another identity over the original feeds in real time.

After emerging in the first half of 2022, novel face swaps rapidly grew by 295% from H1 to H2. "In 2020, we warned of the emerging threat of deepfakes being digitally injected into camera feeds to impersonate an individual's biometric verification process," said Andrew Bud, CEO of iProov.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/02/08/novel-face-swaps-threat-to-biometric-security/