Password Manager software developer LastPass warned that one of its employees was targeted by a social engineering attack that used an audio deepfake which impersonated the company’s CEO.
Fortunately, the (trained) employee grew suspicious and avoided falling for the attack. You can count on the fact that other password manager software companies are attacked as well.
Mike Kosak, Senior Principal Intelligence Analyst at LastPass, explained in a blog post, “In our case, an employee received a series of calls, texts, and at least one voicemail featuring an audio deepfake from a threat actor impersonating our CEO via WhatsApp.
As the attempted communication was outside of normal business communication channels and due to the employee’s suspicion regarding the presence of many of the hallmarks of a social engineering attempt (such as forced urgency), our employee rightly ignored the messages and reported the incident to our internal security team so that we could take steps to both mitigate the threat and raise awareness of the tactic both internally and externally.”
LastPass warns that the technology to create deepfakes is now widely available, so these types of attacks will likely continue to increase. Increasing awareness of these techniques is a crucial defense against these attacks.
“Deepfakes use generative artificial intelligence to leverage existing audio and/or visual samples to create a new and unique recording of a targeted individual saying or doing whatever the creator has programmed the deepfake tool to fabricate,” LastPass says.
“Deepfakes are often associated with political misinformation and disinformation campaigns, but the combination of the increased quality of deepfakes and the increased availability of the technology used to create them (there are now numerous sites and apps openly available that allow just about anyone to easily create a deepfake) has long been a concern of the private sector as well.”
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LastPass has the story.
