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British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim
- tompccs 2y agoI said this over a year ago elsewhere: Electronic engineers spent decades overcoming thermal noise floors so that humans could communicate over vast distances with small amounts of energy. AI researchers, in a few short years, undid all that by making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans. Until such a time as we live in a Bladerunner-like world of Replicants, being in-person will be the only reliable way to convey a message from human to human. I'm long on travel and in-person meetings, short on VR and telecoms.
- changoplatanero 2y agoIsn't it also possible to scam people in in person meetings by pretending to be someone you aren't? The new thing with deepfakes is that you can pretend to be someone that the victim knows.
- tompccs 2y agoYes but the cost is much higher as is the risk of being caught and arrested.
- another-dave 2y agoWhen you say in-person in that sense, do you mean video call rather than DM? I took the GP comment to mean truly in-person, like face-to-face across a table
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tgv 2y agoYes, you can also bludgeon someone to death with a rock, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for everyone to have nukes.
- cageface 2y agoScaling up in-person fraud is also much, much harder.
- dmos62 2y agoWhat you said only applies to communication that requires authenticating a party. Most cases that doesn't matter. Voice or video communication used to be inherently unfakeable, now that it is fakeable, we'll just treat it like text comms, relying on secure channels, signing etc.
- ta93754829 2y agowe're probably ~10 years away from replicants. in 20years there's going to be millions of tesla humanoid robots all over the place
- binvader 2y ago[flagged]
- thedrbrian 2y agoWe’ve had millions of robotaxis since 2017
- sambazi 2y agodo you have actual numbers? thought it was a couple thousand
- tsimionescu 2y agoThe whole point of Replicants is that they look exactly like humans in person. Even if we assume AI and robotics advance 100 times or more in the next 10 years to allow the technical part of this, we are not even close to any makeup and prosthetics tech that could make a robot even slightly resemble a human in-person. And I have to mention, Tesla robots are way behind the competition, it's not even clear if their robot does anything really on its own, given how much they fake their videos of it with "creative" editing.
- spacebanana7 2y agoHuman written text has been indistinguishable from machine written text for a very long time. We've still managed to maintain chains of trust to discern legitimate messages with decent success rates.
- mulmen 2y agoOr we’re really bad at detecting fraud.
- blitzo 2y agoWe need new ident protocol just for AI. I think that's part of Altman doing that orb thingy with iris scanner. It's creepy though and I'll never touch that things.
- malermeister 2y agoWhat's wrong with good ol' private keys?
- Muromec 2y agoSame as with public transport. You can’t have because it’s haram for some political position
- pjc50 2y agoNobody is anti-public-key crypto per se any more, the US government export control war ended long ago. It's just too much of a hassle to do the key management.
- ben_w 2y agoThe ability to make an infinite number of them. And that most people have no idea how to verify any ID, so they need a system that turns any given form of ID into a nice and simple "yes" or "no". I'm not at all clear what kind of ID is going to be genuinely useful for video calls, given we should only be trusting existing contacts anyway? But those things are why "private key" isn't sufficient in isolation.
- malermeister 2y agoWhat's wrong with making an infinite number? You just need to check it against one public key.
- ben_w 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
- csomar 2y agoIf only, you know, had a simple and efficient way to authenticate messages and emails...
- pjc50 2y agoThe tech has existed for decades but is clearly not simple.
- persnickety 2y ago> making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans. That's a false dichotomy. "computer-generated chatter and images" ARE messages sent by humans. There are no cases of computers having agency known to me yet. The root of the problem is humans who lie and mislead. Now they merely have more avenues to do so. In the same vein, you could blame the electronic engineers for allowing people to lie quickly and over vast distances.
- sgt101 2y agoJust use a trusted channel? I mean - we have authentication for bank accounts, why wouldn't that be demanded for transactions like this? Without proper authentication of the authorities there's no way that a transaction like this should be put through.
- mrkramer 2y agoGuess what? Cryptography exists.
- masto 2y agoWhen I'm on a company video call, the people I'm meeting with are logged into their company accounts, through the fancy company authentication system. Large warnings are displayed if there are any external participants, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to disable the ability to even have guests. Third-party video conference software is banned and blocked from installation on work computers. I am not in the finance department, but in software engineering and operations, two-party controls are everywhere. I can't check in code without reviews. I can't access production systems or make changes without approval from another team member. I would think that similar processes could be put into place for transferring tens of millions of dollars. In other words, there are ways to deal with this that don't come down to "mistrust all technology and revert to face-to-face meetings and handing cash to each other".
- bongodongobob 2y agoAlmost everywhere I've worked disallows external participants on Teams by default. We add exceptions when needed. I don't know if this is standard, but has been at the larger companies I've worked at.
- michaelt 2y agoIf I was the attacker, I'd use credential-stuffing or something to get access to some random employee's account. Doesn't have to be anyone important. Then I'd set up a short-notice multi-way meeting between the target, the CEO and the hacked account. The deepfake 'CEO' then turns up with no alarms raised, except one wrong name - easily dismissed as a glitch, or an assistant having booked the meeting.
- david_allison 2y ago$10k/week in crypto lets you easily 'hack' a random corporate account
- echoangle 2y agoSo your method assumes you can easily take over an employee account? Isn't that the hard part?
- imgabe 2y agoI know it's a meme and all, but doesn't blockchain solve this? Ok, Mr. Guy who looks like my boss on Video Call, I can send those funds, just sign the transaction with your private key and it'll all be done.
- hacker_88 2y agoThat's just regular Crypto stuff not Cryptocurrency
- pjc50 2y agoBlockchain does not authenticate the receiver, so there are all sorts of attacks involving substituting the payment address, from dumb (stickers over QR codes) to sophisticated.
- imgabe 2y agoThat’s a completely different thing though. The problem here is deepfakes where someone pretending to have the authority to send money tells you to send money.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoWhy do you need blockchain for signing with private key.
- jessetemp 2y agoNot that it changes your point much, but AI research also took decades. It’s just that the last few years are when all these milestones were achieved
- noAnswer 2y agoCryptographically sign all the things!!!!! A L L T H E T H I N G S !!!!
- bartlettD 2y ago> According to police, the worker had initially suspected he had received a phishing email from the company’s UK office, as it specified the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized. Regardless of the sophistication of the deepfake, surely this rings huge alarm bells, right? I'm not even sure I'd be comfortable making secret transactions on instruction from my boss. Even if your boss is actually asking you to do this, how can you have the financial authority to transfer $25M and not the savvy to think that being asked to transfer huge amounts of money in secret isn't going to result in you getting thrown under the bus?
- llamaimperative 2y agoBig transactions happen and it’s some people’s jobs to execute them
- Semaphor 2y ago"in secret" is the issue
- netsharc 2y agoI guess a scammer can sell it as "we're buying something significant [another company?], this will affect our share price if the info goes out, so you need to sign this NDA and keep this quiet, you're only 1 out of 10 people who knows this...". They could also sell it as payment for an e.g. consulting firm for the above secret deal...
- the8472 2y agoSecret doesn't mean they can't use internal authenticated communication channels, at the very least to send a redacted confirmation.
- 2y ago
- laurencei 2y agoWhat I find strange about this is you dont need it to be "deepfake". Just an inside job. If a large company allows a single employee to transfer millions to a new bank account/vendor that has no history, on "their belief" the instruction came from an approved person (i.e. their boss, CFO etc) - that company has major governance issues that are not related to deepfake. Imagine the more simple scenario - an employee transfers millions, knowingly fraudulantly, to some people they are working with. They then simply supply some "deep fake" pictures and a story how it was an accident - and boom; you walk away with millions. Checks and balances exist for many reasons - deepfake doesnt overcome those by itself. This company is just missing basic steps that would have protected itself here. edit: in fact- its even more obviously some inside job; put the deepfake aside for a moment. How was the meeting even booked? Their PR person said "none of our internal systems were compromised". So this meeting magically appeared in someone's calendar? Using their internal video system (Skype or Teams or whatever). And the criminals knew to target this person, with enough knowledge of random office people to deep fake them? Come on...
- skanderbm 2y agoIt reminds me of this case of a hypnotised bank teller http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7309947.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7309947.stm
- bsenftner 2y agoYou're the only commenter using critical analysis, everyone else is just flapping their jaws. I hate discussing deepfakes. I'm one of the original patent holders of automated actor replacement technology. I developed it for personalized advertising, after having been an actor replacement specialist in a bunch of VFX film you probably saw. I spent from 2002 to '08 creating a VFX pipeline, with global patent protections, and an ethical guidance that included public education on this fundamental new technology. Long story short, I needed financing, went to VCs and angels and they were perfectly winning to fund a porn company, but not what I'd planned: an ethical rollout of a sensitive and very powerful technology with many legs, few realize even today. By '13 I was bankrupt, burned out, and one of my tech partners, a global leader in facial recognition hired me. That's a different story. Actor replacement technology is a fundamental capability with applications far more important than fraud and pornography. But our civilization is far far too immature to realize any of them.
- wwilim 2y ago[flagged]
- verve_rat 2y agoMaybe just the people that can move $25 million should be in the same room, the rest of us can keep the 12 second commute down the hallway.
- olig15 2y agoExplain your reasoning for this. I work in the office, but the vast (98%) of my meetings are on teams or zoom. When you work in a company with multiple locations (and in different countries) working in our assigned office isn’t going to help at all.
- pjc50 2y agoHalf my colleagues are in a different office on the other side of the world. There is no one single "office".
- klyrs 2y agoHow cool is it that Zoom is capturing our data and using it to train their "AI" efforts? Perhaps nobody in the world is better positioned to completely disrupt nearly every tech-using company, by emulating our C-suites, and ordering us to drain everything. Imagine the Robin Hood shenanigans they could get up to! Or the evil supervillain shenanigans! Who cares, really. The future is so fun!
- illwrks 2y agoThe real issue here is a lack of proper risk controls around business processes involving money. Regardless of if it’s £3 for a coffee or £25m for a Secret acquisition there should be an agreed process that everyone involved in business transactions should be aware of so that if they are suddenly privy to a deal they can navigate and validate the authenticity of their involvement.
- legel 2y agoThis brings up an interesting “risk control” that one of my tech investors personally implemented with his family, in case a audio/video version of him ever asks to do anything crazy: secret passwords, agreed upon in person.
- XorNot 2y agoTechnically Signal solves this problem with safety codes. The UI really could stand to be more assertive about what they mean though.
- GiveOver 2y agoI notice every time somebody gets a new phone because it says "Your safety number with x has changed" but whenever I've spoken about it with friends, they have no idea what it means. An additional sentence could help here, such as "You might want to double check that you're really talking to x" or the classic "It's possible someone is doing something nasty". Although I understand that this would definitely scare a lot of people, maybe even push them into thinking Signal is insecure.
- graemep 2y agoWith £25m there ought to be at least two people required to authorise the transfer.
- bgrainger 2y agoPrevious discussion (from when it happened but before the victim company was named): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248649
- EZ-E 2y agoLearned recently my mid sized company was also targeted. The CFO received first a (fake) call from a lawyer asking to confirm a transaction, then later a deep faked voicemail from the co founder mentioning that same transaction. It apparently all sounded very real. The attacks are becoming very targeted, customized and elaborate. Very far from the Nigerian prince emails written in poor English...
- dboreham 2y agoI think the underlying problem is cultural: people have been conditioned to expect others to authenticate them (give me the last 4 digits of your SSN, tell me the last two transactions on your account), BUT they haven't been told they need to authenticate others. They just aren't thinking "how do I know this is who I think it is? How do I know they haven't been kidnapped?".
- blitzar 2y agoMy personal protocol with my bank when they ring me is for me to call them back. The bank workers are normally quite understanding - except when it is someone from fraud detection (and yes these are legitimate calls) and they tend to get odly defensive that I wont hand out my personal information.
- _tk_ 2y agoThe article lacks details to discuss this particular incident. This could reasonably be a company with poor governance, insecure configuration and authentication - and then this is a non-story. OTOH, with the amount of money in question, a sophisticated attack is absolutely believeable, and even 2FA and better process governance will help you out. Maybe a PKI does, but as always, it depends.
- wiradikusuma 2y agoI think one way to verify legitimacy is by calling back. For example, "Ok boss, just protocol, but you wouldn't mind if I call you using your usual number?" (or just do it without informing in advance). Ideally they screen-record (can you do that in Android/iPhone?), so at least if it's really scam, they can say "but I follow protocol, here's the evidence". Btw we once had a similar scam attempt. "The CEO" emailed Finance in great urgency to transfer money. Good thing the CEO was sitting next to the Finance lady. I was sitting next to them watching the horror turned comedy.
- betaby 2y agoIt's not a BitCoin, so transaction has been reversed since then, righ?