Ferrari exec foils deepfake attempt by asking a question only CEO could answer | Hacker News Reader

Ferrari exec foils deepfake attempt by asking a question only CEO could answer

fortune.com

16 pointsthunderbong17 comments

"The WhatsApp messages seen by Bloomberg didn’t come from Vigna’s usual business mobile number. The profile picture also was different.."

I think common sense was more than enough here.

Depends on the business context, our main investor at my last company would always call me from random phones, his phone, his girlfriend’s phone, a burner phone of his, think I had like 4 different numbers saved that could be him. If he asked me to do something I always had to verify him, and he’d act like I’m the one being obstinate.

Let he who has never clicked on a fishing test cast the first stone

I feel seen.

The scary thing is it’s not hard to spoof the CLI on an otherwise untraceable voip call

The wrong people are smart in your story. Media would never pick that up.

https://archive.ph/JbywL

Someone tried this at a firm I was working with. In that case, it was quite obvious, but nonetheless one should think the tech will only get better.

In this case, it was a guy pretending to be an investor, the scam being that they require a small "investment insurance" to be paid to an "insurer" controlled by the scammer. So basically "hey your business sounds great, we want to invest $4M, just send $3K to this guy and we have a deal". Where of course, you will never hear from them again if you send the $3K.

In the video meeting he had a moving mouth on the video, with a mostly static guy sitting at his desk. It looked weird. He also had a Nigerian accent, while pretending to be from Israel.

Like with this article, I thought it would be most obvious if he stumbled over some sort of cultural knowledge. I asked him if he was happy to do a follow up call on a Friday evening, something that seemed unlikely for a guy claiming to be Jewish. He also didn't seem to know the time.

But I can totally see this scam working in the near future. Better real-time graphics would make it hard to know that it wasn't actually what the guy looked like. I could also imagine accent-changing software becoming a thing. The cherry on top would be an AI that actually does know that time zones are a thing, and cultural information from various places.

It's not supposed to be better. It's supposed to be fairly obvious, as I understand it. So only gullible people will respond. They are the mark, not savvy educated people.

Dodgy chain letters full of terrible typesetting, exclamation marks and wildly implausible claims of wealth are designed specifically to attract gullible, uneducated and slightly desperate people, sure

People that can't hide their Nigerian-ness when spending an hour on a call trying to persuade a particular business to wire them $3k for a nominally legitimate business transaction, not so much[1]. They make money when the least gullible person on the call doesn't warn their coworkers they're obviously not real Israelis, not the other way round.

[1]and not so much for the email spam scammers essentially filtering out the 99% of gullible people that have spam filters either...

only stupid people fall for scams...

These are business targeted scams and those are different to run-of-the-mill nigerian prince email spam.

The scammer tries to inject himself into the org to funnel funds out. You will not go far being obvious scammer.

I guess the scammer now knows what those questions are?

I suspect the ability to know the name of the book the CEO recommended a particular executive over a particular timescale won't be especially useful to future scam attempts...

True, but it seems to me that as excellent as that case was, it's not widely sustainable or applicable.

I think a better solution is to verify that it's not a deepfake or other phishing attempt by contacting the person through a different communication channel that you already know and asking them to confirm that the suspect communication was really from them.

I've seen pro grade bullshitters google this stuff on a call

Probably easier for a skilled professional scammer to gaslight a room of Jr Execs into believing that they all had it wrong.

First the scammers came along and made me think twice about the billion dollar inheritance my nigerian prince uncle left for me - now I have to think twice about transfering a couple of million dollars on behalf of the CEO to some random western union branch in the third world somewhere. We really are venturing into uncharted waters as a society.

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