Deepfakes Threatening Businesses—Rising Risks and Challenges

The pace of technological advancement has expanded the dangers that deepfake threats to businesses present. Cybercrooks, now armed with AI, have started using it to make virtually identical reality fake visuals and audio. This is extremely dangerous as deepfakes can easily deceive people because they can use real people’s voices or faces without their knowledge, which becomes a huge concern for corporate security. Most importantly, the result of being a victim of such attacks can be lethal where users undergo loss both in terms of reputation as well as financial losses. 

Therefore, organizations must be careful in the face of this deepfake threat by investing in advanced tools that can detect them, training staff on how to identify deepfakes, and having a good protocol that will keep their operations secure. With the evolution of deepfakes, hackers are making realistic deepfakes that even some powerful detection systems fail to identify. Protection against deepfake ultimatum is crucial for companies to ensure nothing goes wrong with their identification and minimize cyber risks. 

Deepfake Threatening the Business Environment

Businesses are constantly experiencing threats and AI deepfakes scams in business are rising as an important concern. Every organization must identify the progressive concerns related to deepfake technology–used in legitimacy. However, In 2021, the FBI warned companies about deepfake threats. FBI informed them fake actors can create fabricated content for cybercrime and wrong influence operations shortly. 

Cybersecurity experts note that, in 2022, deepfake scams were used against businesses for the first time in two-thirds of cases, up 13% from the previous year, and most often by email.

Although the production of quality deepfakes requires high computing, technical know-how, and time, it is the potential of revenge on a large scale that entices cyber hackers to target large corporations. However, with evolving technological trends and making deepfakes easier and cheaper to create, not to mention small businesses and third-party vendors, will fall prey to these deepfake warnings.

Under this light of never-ending threats, organizations stand to lose very productive money-making opportunities that involve identity compromise and other unfortunate cases.

Business Identification Compromise Concerns

Also, cybercriminals utilized the deepfake audio to rob $35 million from a Hong Kong Bank—the biggest financial loss due to fake content. This adventure happened due to the fake identity of the current employees caused possible security breaches. 

Criminals can harm the company in these ways through impersonation: 

• The company may share critical trade secrets with a hacker.
• Forge false rumors in such a way that company culture can be hampered.
• Relations between customers and partners can be damaged.
• Stock value destabilized, and all kinds of chaos in the supply chain.

Even the CEOs and CFOs of Fortune 500 firm executives are not secure from the deepfake impersonation attack. At times, deepfakes have been used to shame or discredit those leaders publicly by attributing damaging statements or actions to them. Sometimes this damages their reputation and that of their companies.

Deepfake Scamming Risks

Deepfake scams are when there is the spreading of misinformation using phishing tactics to scare employees into making unauthorized payments or revealing sensitive information. This scam depends on the audio deepfake of an organization’s trusted person. 

In this scam, cybercriminals use web conferences or voice mail to represent themselves as an authority and use social engineering such as BEC methods to create urgency so they can pressure the employees to get the funds or data details. 

Moreover, fraudsters in phishing scams are using the latest deepfake technology raising the question about the security authenticity, especially in the biometric authentication systems that every organization looks into.

Authentication Risks

Authentication technologies are also experiencing deepfake threats, for instance, facial and voice recognition systems. Recent research by the University of Chicago demonstrated that AI-generated deepfakes can fool multiple real-world voice recognition systems. Some of these deepfake-generating techniques can even fool widely used facial recognition APIs and sometimes even certain smartphone security features, but three-dimensional mapping technology, used by a few smartphones, is not vulnerable to two-dimensional deepfakes.

With deepfake technology becoming more accessible to organizations that are not prepared to protect themselves through strong security measures and awareness about such threats, high-net-worth individuals, and even professionals with access to critical infrastructure will likely find themselves the subject of cybercriminal targeting activities rather than executives. Anyone can be the target of business deepfake scams from power plant manager to social media influencers to steal their data or money.  

Deepfake Financial Scams and Fraudulent Transactions

Today, deepfake technology is used to impersonate high-level executives during video conferences, which causes huge financial losses. For instance, fraudsters impersonated the Chief Financial Officer of a multinational company and pressured an employee to transfer over $25 million.

With the growing maturity of deepfakes, malice can now dissimulate in faces, voices, and mannerisms, providing more challenges for employees to identify fraud. Therefore, more importance is given to strong technologies of detection and good training programs among employees to stop these attacks.

Another part of the scam saw AI deepfakes avoid the use of facial recognition systems. This enabled the fraudsters to carry out 90 loan applications and open 54 bank accounts using identity cards stolen from someone else. Hong Kong police detained six people in connection with these scams, emphasizing raising further awareness while also working to fortify techniques for concerned deepfake frauds – keeping businesses safe from such advanced threats. The scam only came to light when the employee checked with the parent headquarters of the company, highlighting the importance of verifications that stop future deepfake business frauds.  

Deepfake Influence on Marketing and Brand Image

Deepfake technology is becoming a huge concern for a business’s marketing and brand image alongside becoming sophisticated. A huge amount of fraud risks businesses are experiencing due to AI-generated content which is distorting their brand images while destroying the customer’s trust too. Also, it highlights the legal problems and credibility harm for a brand. To reduce these issues, every company should adopt the business deepfake security to defend their brand image in the market.