How do Deepfakes Affect Cybersecurity?

We’re living in the age of mind-blowing tech solutions, and some of them are used in cases that have nothing in common with improving our lives. In contrast, these solutions help to defraud and deceive people. Some of the most notable examples are deepfakes, which has recently become one of the primary concerns of many businesses and cybersecurity specialists.

In a nutshell, deepfake is the name that has emerged from “deep learning” and “fake.” It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to create a believable, synthetic human voice or video. A deep learning model is trained to the extent that it can generate the imitation of a real person’s voice or image and fool people.

Deepfakes are the reasons for multiple cyber frauds and compromised scams. The main “advantage” of deepfakes is that they’re hard to detect, hence have endless possibilities. And this fact bolsters people’s concerns because the threat is real, and they need to find ways to fight it to avoid being subjected to disinformation.

As a result, businesses now pay closer attention to their cybersecurity measures. They hire security leaders in-house or cooperate with offshore software development centers like Qubit Labs because it’s a more cost-effective option. If you consider outsourcing cybersecurity services as well, you can check out the rates in different countries to choose the most suitable one.

Getting back to the topic of deepfakes, let’s see how exactly they influence cybersecurity and how companies can fight them.

What is the impact of deepfakes on cybersecurity?

Thinking from the point of view of media manipulation, deepfakes are just a new “edition” of the well-known ruse. This is a new way to manipulate people, which is a substitute for using photoshop to edit photos or splicing audio and videotapes. Deepfakes have a lot of potential to go viral and catch the attention of the targeted audience. They’re aimed at impressing people with something, be it controversial speeches from politicians or questionable videos from the heads of the companies.

Deepfakes are often compared to phishing because they make people click on links that have malicious components inside. Also, these links can redirect users to malicious websites.

Some experts mention that the criminals don’t like wasting too much time on coming up with such complicated methods and usually opt for well-known phishing rather than deepfakes. Nevertheless, there still are reported cases of fraudsters using deepfake voice to persuade the company’s employees to send money to criminals’ accounts.

This means that the fraudsters sometimes opt for something more sophisticated than phishing, using the voices of managers and senior team members to convince other workers to do something. Sometimes, deepfakes are used to make false statements and claims about the company to undermine its reputation. Such events have negative consequences, dealing with which requires time and money, as well as efforts focused on restoring the brand’s trust.

How can businesses fight deepfakes?

Since the usual cybersecurity tools aren’t designed to fight deepfakes, the companies face many challenges, trying to reorganize the activities of the departments responsible for their security.

Large companies, in particular, Facebook and Microsoft, are now developing solutions that can help detect deepfake files. They cooperate with the top US universities to establish a significant database of fake videos and make their research more comprehensive. As for Google, it already came up with a database of 3,000 deepfakes, which is aimed to help researchers and cybersecurity specialists fight such recordings and videos.

Here are some valuable tips for the businesses that want to prevent themselves from deepfakes:

Educate your employees

Since employees are the ones who are more exposed to clicking the questionable links, it’s necessary to put their training and vigilance as your top priority. Consider purchasing or developing cybersecurity training. It will help the team members understand the principles of deepfakes, see examples, like an unexpected call from the CEO asking to send money urgently, and know what they should do and how they need to react in such situations.

Stay transparent

In case you’re a victim of a deepfake attack, consider making this news go public. This will help to make your audience aware that it wasn’t your company’s fault that such an event occurred, and they won’t perceive it negatively. Don’t ignore the attack, and don’t think that your audience won’t find out. Truth always comes out eventually, so take your chance to avoid backfire.

Verify every user

It happens that a person who just logged in isn’t the person you think this is. To prevent such situations, make sure to confirm each user via implementing different authentication methods. Although this takes time, you’ll be confident the right person is accessing your company’s resources.

Think twice before giving access and privilege

The more individuals have access to some vital business attributes, the harder it will be to detect the fraudster in case of a deepfake attack. So, before granting access to the user, take time to validate their device, check-up authorization, and verify the network. Also, don’t forget about detecting and remediating threats. You can leverage AI and ML tools to facilitate these processes and not sacrifice the organization’s productivity.

Conclusion

Since there are many tools for creating deepfakes, literally anyone who has a goal to harm a certain company can achieve it. The organizations that don’t want to fall victims to deepfakes should start with the basics, namely educating their employees on the course of action in case of such attacks. A zero-trust approach and greater control over cybersecurity can keep companies safe from dealing with deepfake’s negative impact.