 Social engineering is the oldest yet still most effective hacking technique because it exploits humans which are the least secure parts of most of our systems. All of our digital systems they continue to get more secure day after day when a security vulnerability is discovered in a program and it's responsibly reported to the program's maintainer and then it's patched in a timely fashion that particular vulnerability is no longer able to be exploited it no longer exists as long as it doesn't accidentally get reintroduced by future code editing but human exploits they're a lot harder to fix our systems never really get patched and we are still vulnerable to ancient exploits even though we're aware of them hackers can still use them against us in some cases and to make matters worse technologies like phone calls video calls and email they create new attack vectors for remote social engineering attacks no longer does a hacker have to make their way onto your organization's premises and get recorded on security cameras and things like that to try social engineering and video and photo manipulation tech it can assist hackers in making their impersonations or their fake pieces of information seem more convincing that they're sending to you over email video or whatever and of course deep fake technology can be used for making impersonations as well and recently people in new hampshire were receiving a lot of robocalls with deep faked audio of joe biden telling them not to vote in the primaries into save their vote for the general election in november which doesn't make any sense if you know about how our elections work because voters can vote in both elections so this is the audio that people were receiving in new hampshire a bunch of malachi you know the value of voting democratic on our votes count it's important that you save your vote for the november election we'll need your help in electing democrats up and down the ticket voting this tuesday only enables the republicans in their quest to elect donald trump again your vote makes a difference in november not just tuesday if you would like to be removed from future calls please press two now now this audio has actually been floating around for a while and pin drop security actually managed to analyze the audio and figure out that 11 labs was the text to speech engine that was being used to generate this audio and 11 labs actually banned the user account that was connected to creating it but obviously once the audio is out there on the internet it's never really going to go away which is part of the reason why i think deep fake analysis like what this company here is doing is going to end up being a very important part of information security in the coming years now personally i don't think this is a very convincing biden deep fake it has that distinct deep fake cadence but then again most people have not been exposed to enough deep fakes yet to know what to look for or what to listen for right like this is still a pretty new technology and most people don't even know how to go frame by frame in a video to tell that it's fake or to look at an image and tell that it's photoshopped or even verify who sent them an email like a big part of the reason why phishing emails are still so effective is that most people don't know how to check their email headers because anybody can spoof an email address like they can make it look like it's from you know whoever they want and if your spam filter doesn't catch that and flag it as you know spam which they often don't then your own scam detector right your own common sense or you know ability to identify scams is going to be the last line of defense the best way to defend yourself against social engineering is to remain calm and to assess the facts like verify what is going on in the situation like i said people can vote in both elections so the premise here is malarkey right plus you would probably never hear a politician telling people not to vote anyway like that doesn't sound like something that they would want to have coming out of their mouth and even be a soundbite right like you'd think they'd be a little bit aware of something like that and just avoid saying those words together nevertheless this wave of deep fake biden calls it prompted the FCC to outlaw the use of ai generated voices in robo calls altogether so i guess that's another job actually that ai is not going to be able to take from humans anytime soon now of course hacktivism you know politically motivated hacking isn't as common as hacking for cold hard cash so of course deep fakes they've been used for those kinds of scams as well and recently an employee in hong kong that was working for a multinational financial firm was tricked into paying out 25 million dollars to fraudsters that were using deep fake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer and several other staff in a video conference call now according to hong kong police the employee was skeptical at first about an email that he had received telling him to send these fraudsters money but then when that video conference call happened with deep fakes of his colleagues that looked and sounded real he was then convinced that everything was legit and he sent the money and the employee said that he didn't know that it was a scam until later on when he checked with the corporate head office in the uk to see if the cfo really was asking for 25 million dollars now the police didn't reveal the name or details of the company or the worker that was involved in this incident but what i suspect the deep fake could have looked like would have been very similar to the deep fakes of singapore's prime minister laurence wong and other leaders that have been circulating on the internet for months now dear singaporeans the day has come i am pleased to introduce to you the quantum ai investment project starting november 11th 2023 we have launched a project that will allow everyone to receive guaranteed monthly dividends with minimal investment the automated trading system makes only the most profitable trades allowing investors to increase their income earnings from eight thousand dollars are absolutely real the company has made sure that this income is available to everyone that is why we have reduced the minimum investment amount to 250 dollars all payouts are guaranteed by me personally and my reputation so these deep fake videos are essentially made by taking a real video and then dubbing over it with a deep fake voice with one of these you know text to speech generators and i think some modifications are also being made around the mouth area to make it match like make their mouth movements match closer to what's being said so if you know what to look for you could probably tell that these are fake as well and again given the context like if you can avoid falling for just literally anything because it appears to be coming from an authority figure like a prime minister or your boss then you'll probably be safe i mean it's kind of ridiculous for them to be recommending some kind of like crypto quantum you know investment platform right like the context doesn't make a whole lot of sense so yeah again stopping and assessing those facts are one of the best defenses against all forms of social engineering right because it's all the same at the end of the day it's just going to take new forms it's going to you know obviously use whatever the latest technology is right and right now that's going to be generative ai so who didn't see that coming and that's why i think digital literacy is so important where way past just checking our email headers and our ssl certificates now you've got to be somewhat familiar with this ai tech and of course have a bit of common sense that's always been the key to security so stay safe out there like and comment to hack the algorithm and have a great rest of your day