Armand here coming to you from lovely Omaha (where the Indian food is surprisingly good by the way). Over the last few Tech Essentials, we highlighted how cybercriminals can understand precisely who, when, and how to target their victims.
To recap, it all starts with getting into one’s email account using cybercriminal underworld services like EvilProxy. Then the cybercriminals write emails in your exact style, tone, and language – any language – using GenAI tools like FraudGPT. Finally, as we discussed with the example of Microsoft’s AI VASA-1 project, they can use the latest AI for real-time voice and face replication tools as the call-back verification meeting, where the fake lookalike you says, “Yes, please send that two hundred and twenty two thousand dollars like I asked.”
Sounds complicated? Well, not so much, as these cybercriminal consortia (not even the sophisticated criminal gangs with Russian masterminds, but the loosely connected ones) regularly share their secrets and tactics with each other in online chat and social network groups.
One such group, the “Yahoo Boys,” comprises a few hundred thousand Nigerian cybercriminals, show off how easy it is for them to use software to initiate or join a web video meeting looking and sounding as if they were YOU (or anyone else for that matter) – speaking in real time.
It’s simple for them. For those without computers or who don’t want to leave their couch, they can do this with two phones, one phone doing the face and voice replication, and the other phone recording the screen of the first phone connected to the meeting. For those who make an investment into a laptop, it is easier, as they see the video meeting on half their screen while their web cam records their face and sound and displays in the upper right (only visible to them). In the lower right of the screen, YOUR face is displayed, and the sound is in YOUR voice (using AI face and voice replication real-time tech). Unfortunately, every month, this tech seems to be getting smoother and more plausible.
Source: Wired
The reason I’m now in Omaha is because Warren Buffet stated this at his recent annual meeting: "Obviously, AI has potential for good things too, but based on the one [deep fake scam as noted above] I saw recently, I practically would send money to myself over and over in some crazy country.” Buffet went on to say, referring to AI-enabled scamming, “It’s going to be the growth industry of all time.” [Note, he indicated he is not investing in scamming.]
With unfettered and hyper-scaled growth in AI-enabled scamming, you simply cannot win without tools that let you see the unseen, eavesdrop on the eavesdroppers, and attempt to quickly level the playing field with all these international cybercriminals. The odds are not in the good guys’ favor.
We’ve been speaking about the RPost PRE-Crime analytical AI security for so many of these articles because we believe it can provide a low-cost, highly effective weapon in the AI-enabled cyberscam arms race. Simply put, it is essential. Without it, your team will be tricked. We (almost) guarantee it.
Get ahead of this with RPost. To learn more about Email Eavesdropping™ and PRE-Crime protection, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more.
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