One in two Russians doesn't know what a "deepfake" is, while almost a third of employees at large companies have already encountered fraudulent attacks using this technology, according to analysts at MTS Link.
To clarify: deepfakes are videos, audio recordings, and images created using artificial intelligence that mimic real people and are practically indistinguishable from them. The most common types of deepfakes are hyperrealistic face replacements in videos, audio deepfakes, and photorealistic portraits used in advertising and social media.
The study, which involved a thousand Russians from cities with a population of over one million, notes that the audience mainly interacted with deepfakes in the form of entertainment content on the Internet — 64% or advertising — 27%.
In 19% of cases, when people became victims of social engineering aimed at making them perform certain actions or disclose confidential information, fraudsters impersonated their friends and relatives. And in 18% of cases, they pretended to be managers and colleagues.
Most often, representatives of medium-sized businesses face attempts to steal data using the image of colleagues. Whereas in small and large businesses, such attacks are slightly less common, and in microbusinesses, they do not occur at all.
Fraudsters using deepfakes most often contacted victims in popular messengers, with social networks in second place.
A successful attack with the impersonation of a manager can cost a company millions of rubles and cause significant reputational damage. Separating work and personal communications can protect against the theft of corporate data: if only a corporate video conferencing platform is used for communication within the company, trust in a video call from a manager in Telegram will by definition be lower. In addition, developers of corporate video conferencing systems are actively integrating special anti-fraud solutions into them.
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