For the first time in Europe, scammers faked a voice using artificial intelligence and stole a quarter of a million dollars. In the UK, the CEO of an energy company transferred money to cybercriminals after a phone call with a robot. The details of this story are given by Victoria Feofanova and Alexander Rassokhin.
The CEO of a British energy company spoke on the phone with his boss, the head of the head office in Germany. He asked him to urgently transfer almost $ 250 thousand to the Hungarian supplier. The money went to the account of a Hungarian bank, and the British top manager did not even suspect that he had been talking to the robot all this time. The voice on the other end of the line was so similar to the voice of his boss: the artificial intelligence imitated not only the manner of communication, but also a slight German accent. The scam was revealed only when the scammers tried to pull this trick a second time.
This is perhaps the largest cybercrime of its kind, but the attackers had to get the voice recordings somewhere, explains Anna Vlasova, director of linguistic developments at Nanosemantics: “At first, the scammers had to get the conversations of the person whose voice they then imitate. This, by the way, is the question of how they got it. Most likely, the fraud starts with this, because just like that you will not find enough recordings of the same person to successfully synthesize his voice."
The cybercriminals first sent the money to Mexico and then distributed it to different accounts. Until the police were able to find them. The Central Bank also warned that the scammers began to use fake votes. Such crimes in Russia mostly take place on social networks and so far without the participation of artificial intelligence. The scheme is old: the victim's account is hacked and either calls friends with a request to borrow money, or send messages. Thus, it was already possible to steal almost 0.5 billion rubles. To train artificial intelligence to imitate the voice of a certain person is expensive and ineffective, believes the deputy head of the information security department of the Central Bank Artem Sychev: “The applicability of such fraud methods is extremely low. This requires the attacker to know for sure that the victim will react correctly to this voice.
But the expert on neural networks of the Bitrix24 service, Alexander Serbul, does not agree with the regulator. In his opinion, fraud involving artificial intelligence will develop: “With the help of artificial intelligence, it is possible to fake a voice, even make a video - realistic images that do not exist in nature, but cannot be distinguished from real ones. This is not difficult to do. It is enough to raise the machines on the GPU in the Amazon cloud, and there they rent them out, for a little money you can also raise the cluster and calculate the neural network within a day and fake the director's voice. What does this mean? You need to understand how the information security structure works in general."
According to European experts, scammers will increasingly fake their voices. This is facilitated by the fact that programs that allow imitating someone else's voice are now sold by many companies. At the same time, you do not need any special skills to use them.
Artificial intelligence is also used to combat cybercriminals. IT analysts note that in a couple of years, about 40% of companies in the world will use neural networks to protect data.
Author: Alexander Rassokhin
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