SECURITY ESSEN MAGAZINE


TIME TO FACE FACTS F


Deepfakes are now so


convincing, seeing is no longer believing. And the technology behind them is


both sophisticated and easy to acquire which presents an ongoing challenge for those tasked with uncovering them


OR 18 MONTHS, AN ISRAELI-BORN CONMAN CALLED GILBERT CHIKLI WOULD ROUTINELY CALL COMPANIES ALL OVER FRANCE AND,


USING HIS DEEP, COMMANDING TONE OF VOICE, PERSUADE A SUCCESSION OF HAPLESS MIDDLE MANAGERS HE WAS THEIR GLOBAL CEO.


Then, using a bewildering level blend of persuasion and flattery, he would manipulate them into transferring large sums of money for supposedly secret and sensitive projects. He would even change his voice and ring again later pretending to be a lawyer with advice on how to bypass bank security to wire money to foreign accounts. It was an audacious scam for its time. This was not the


1970s when fraudsters would routinely raid dustbins for letterheads, write bogus memos, forge signatures and, convincingly dressed, walk into a head office and demand bank transfers. This was the tech-savvy 2000s, an era of corporate computing, employee databases and identity cards.


But as he demonstrated, they were open to abuse


simply because employees were trained to more or less trust anything printed by a mainframe computer, a level of perceived authority which created a massive blind spot when it came to internal impersonation. Thankfully, since then significant advances in technology,


protocols and, importantly, training, have gone some way to eradicating all but the most sophisticated intrusions. But such defensive applications have developed in


tandem with equally sophisticated programmes driving the emergence of one of the biggest threats to security of modern times: deepfakes capable of rapidly escalating the verification challenge by weaponising hyper-realistic


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