You may not have $25m in your bank account but here is the state of play of deep fake hacking

That is a long title, but for this well financed, hi-tech cyber-attack it is appropriate. A worked at a multi-national company in Hong Kong was persuaded to transfer $200 million Hong Kong dollars to a variety of accounts, having been reassured by a group video call with the company’s CFO and other workers from the company, that the victim recognised. Everyone in the group except the victim was a deepfake construction!

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’ | CNN

This attack did take planning, plenty of computing power, good timing and the theft of ID cards from the company among other things – but it succeeded.

What is your takeaway from this?

Why was the deepfake group call necessary? Well this whole attack started with a phishing email, of which the victim was suspicious – the deepfake video was designed to get past the victim’s cyber security common sense and training.

Do you have cyber security awareness training in place? You may not have $25m to lose but you will have something at risk.

That is where we can help:

Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles

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