Security News

The Federal Bureau of Investigation warns of increasing complaints that cybercriminals are using Americans' stolen Personally Identifiable Information and deepfakes to apply for remote work positions. The public service announcement, published on the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center today, adds that the deepfakes used to apply for positions in online interviews include convincingly altered videos or images.

Google has quietly banned deepfake projects on its Colaboratory service, putting an end to the large-scale utilization of the platform's resources for this purpose. Colab is an online computing resource that allows researchers to run Python code directly through the browser while using free computing resources, including GPUs, to power their projects.

Two stunning deepfakes that have been broadly covered include a deepfake of Tom Cruise, birthed into the world by Chris Ume and Miles Fisher, and deepfake young Luke Skywalker, created by Shamook and Graham Hamilton, in a recent episode of "The Book of Boba Fett.". Without a similar bone structure and the subject's trademark movements and turns of phrase, even today's most advanced AI would be hard-pressed to make the deepfake perform credibly.

Facebook has removed a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spreading across the social network and the Internet, asking Ukrainian troops lay down their arms and surrender. "Earlier today, our teams identified and removed a deepfake video claiming to show President Zelensky issuing a statement he never did," said Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Meta, Facebook's parent company.

Ransomware attacks used to be limited to a single attack / single extortion attempt, where hackers would demand payment in exchange for decrypting the target organization's files they've encrypted. In addition to ransomware, supply chain attacks have been very effective lately and are also on the rise, with the current trend seeing most of them targeting software companies, with high profile examples including attacks against SolarWinds and Codecov.

If you want people to trust the photos and videos your business puts out, it might be time to start learning how to prove they haven't been tampered with. Microsoft has a quiz you can take to see if you can spot deepfakes yourself; that's less a training tool and more an attempt to increase awareness and media literacy.

How worried should we be about deepfakes? What sort of threat do they pose to digital ID verification and the biometric technology that we are becoming so reliant on, and are there ways to combat the threat? While video deepfakes are arguably the most common, audio deepfakes are also growing in popularity.

An image owner can modify their image in subtle ways which are not themselves very visible, but will sabotage any attempt to inpaint it by adding visible information determined in advance by the markpainter. A photo agency that makes stock photos available on its website with copyright watermarks can markpaint them in such a way that anyone using common editing software to remove a watermark will fail; the copyright mark will be markpainted right back.

Army researchers developed a deepfake detection method that will allow for the creation of state-of-the-art soldier technology to support mission-essential tasks such as adversarial threat detection and recognition. Researchers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory, in collaboration with Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo's research group at the University of Southern California, set out to tackle the significant threat that deepfake poses to our society and national security.

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.