Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?
- Reference: 1595840907
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/27/in_brief_ai/
- Source link:
Rumors of these so-called audio deepfake attacks have been circulating for a while. For instance, it's [1]believed a British energy biz was scammed out of $243,000 when miscreants used algorithms to impersonate an executive’s voice on a call to convince staff to transfer cash to a crook's bank account.
Nisos, a security intelligence shop, has now [2]shared , via [3]Vice , a short [4]audio clip that they believe is an example of such a fraud.
It’s a short clip, handed to them by a client, of what's supposed to be a CEO leaving a voicemail for someone. In a croaky, robotic voice, the boss asks for “immediate assistance to finalize an urgent business deal." Details are vague, though we're told the recipient of the message didn't fall for it, and technical analysis of the audio showed it was likely computer generated.
Still, just letting you know.
Facebook makes a fakebook to analyze malicious behavior
Facebook has built a virtual Facebook filled with machine-learning bots to simulate and study malicious behavior on its social media platform.
The agents are designed to mimic real Facebook users; they can send messages to one another and comment on each other’s posts. The tool known as Web-Enabled Simulation (WES) was announced this month.
Now Facebook is looking for ways to use the bots for useful areas in machine learning, including multi-agent systems, game AI, and programming languages from other developers. If you’re interested in using the tech, you can submit a research proposal to get your hands on the WES platform.
Researchers [5]said they used the software to build a fake Facebook environment to create bots looking to buy banned items on its platform, things like guns or drugs, to see whether they could bypass internal detection systems.
AI accountants that are actually, er, humans
An AI startup that boasted it had built software to automatically pay bills and file tax forms on behalf of customers has come under fire for quietly hiring humans to do most of the dirty work.
After raising $100m in a year, ScaleFactor [6]announced it was going to shut down “a majority of its operations” starting from the end August. CEO Kurt Rathmann laid off half of his employees and blamed it all on the difficulties of operating during the COVID-19 virus pandemic.
But it appears the upstart may not have been doing too well even before the bio-nasty outbreak. Its automated accounting tools for things like bookkeeping, payroll, paying bills, and tax forms produced paperwork riddled with errors, it is claimed.
ScaleFactor even hired a human team of workers from The Outsourced Accountant in the Philippines to correct the mistakes and handle the filings, Forbes [7]reported . One customer claimed they lost $17,000 after ScaleFactor bungled a transaction.
ScaleFactor declined to comment on the claims.
University of Florida gifted an AI supercomputer
The University of Florida will update its HiPerGator supercomputer cluster to include an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD unit, built using the chip biz's latest Ampere GPU architecture, in hopes of hitting up to 700 petaFLOPS of AI compute power.
Each DGX SuperPOD is made up of 140 DGX A100 systems, a total of 1,120 Ampere GPUs. That’s not cheap, though fortunately the university doesn’t have to spend too much money on it. Nvidia and one of its cofounders Chris Malachowsky is sending it as a [8]$50m gift .
Malachowsky is an alumnus of the university’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, and completed his degree in electrical engineering in 1980. The University of Florida will be investing another $20m to create an AI datacenter to house the supercomputer. The machine will be used to run predictive models across various subjects, including economics and medicine. The HiPerGator super is expected to be completed in 2021. ®
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[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402
[2] https://www.nisos.com/white-papers/rise_synthetic_audio_deepfakes
[3] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkyqvb/deepfake-audio-impersonating-ceo-fraud-attempt
[4] https://soundcloud.com/jason-koebler/redacted-clip
[5] https://ai.facebook.com/blog/a-facebook-scale-simulator-to-detect-harmful-behaviors
[6] https://scalefactor.com/scaleblog/a-message-from-the-founder-and-ceo/
[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/07/20/scalefactor-raised-100-million-in-a-year-then-blamed-covid-19-for-its-demise-employees-say-it-had-much-bigger-problems/
[8] https://news.ufl.edu/2020/07/nvidia-partnership/
[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"
Any large transfers of money should have some sort of procedure to check. Although I suppose ego might resist anything even suggestive of being questioned.
Re: should have some sort of procedure to check
I still don't get how this kind of thing works.
- "Hi, I'm your boss or supervisor or person-in-charge, please transfer a bazillion dollars to this account.".
- "Sure, boss or person-in-charge -- a bazillion dollars transferred to account number 1234-56 that I never knew existed and is not in our payments or contacts records".
How hard it is to the receiving bank (with a proper request from the authorities) to get the deposit information and track down the account owner? At least here in Brazil, you cannot open a bank account without several identification documents.
I guess one could use a third-party account and withdraw the scam money as soon as it is deposited, but there are so many ways that this could go wrong...
AC, but not because I'm contemplating changing careers.
Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"
We should get scared when AI impersonates a Boss in real time, rather than a pre-recorded message
Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"
@trevorde some might suggest that this is the current status of ai.
Cognitive abilities ⩽ a 3 year old, can't make a correct decision on its own regardless of the size of its training set, shows extreme bias, gets confused when asked to distinguish between a picture of a dog and a duck. Certainly sounds like most of my prior bosses.
Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"
> it won't pass mustard
The phrase is "pass muster" (from military inspections), but I find this particular eggcorn rather amusing.
Unfortunately, my first interpretation is that, for one to "pass mustard" the mustard must have been indigestible, and therefore fake - the complete opposite of the intended meaning.
Fortunately, a less scatological interpretation would be that something might "not pass [the] mustard" because it wanted the mustard all for itself, and is therefore a selfish bastard not to be associated with.
Re: a "software-generated voicemail message"
Passing mustard?
Is that like cutting the muster?
Mine's the one with the Mondegreene and Malaprop label .....
a "software-generated voicemail message"
That's interesting, but if the Boss is calling you, you have his number and can check that it is the right one. Plus, your boss may a have croaky voice, but I don't think software is yet up to the stage where it can convincingly impersonate someone you know.
Of course, I'm situating the whole thing as boss-calls-financial-person-as-usual kind of scenario. I don't see how this could really work. If the company is small, the finance guy is going to know the boss very well and it won't pass mustard. If the company is big, the finance guy being called will wonder why the hell he's the one called, go to his manager and it shouldn't pass mustard either.
And yet some numbskull did fall for this.
There's always a better idiot.