InfoSecurity Europe, widely acknowledged as the chief global challenger to RSA in the US, kicked off with a Keynote speech and panel discussion on “Mapping the Deepfake Landscape.” Broadcaster and researcher Henry Adjer quoted numerous examples of the increasing sophistication of malicious deepfakes.
The most interesting example of a deepfake was a false image purporting to show an explosion near the Pentagon shared by multiple verified Twitter accounts last year, resulting in a brief dip in the value of the New York Stock Exchange.
“Threat actors are starting to explore the possibility of using deepfakes to move share prices with fake podcasts and video interviews with company C-suite executives of listed companies. Even if the fake is quickly spotted and squashed and the company’s shares are only impacted for 10 minutes, the threat actor can make a huge profit by speculating on the movement of a specific stock,” says Tim Grieveson, senior vice president of global cyber risk at cybersecurity firm BitSight, which in 2021 received £250 million funding from financial services giant Moody’s.
If, for example, a threat actor were to release a fake podcast of the company financial officer (CFO) of a major company making a dire profit warning, he could make millions by simply shorting the stock. All the threat actors would need to execute the scam would be a few minutes or seconds of a genuine video of the CFO and some freely available inexpensive software.
But while the threat of deepfake financial scams raises its ugly head, older cyber threats are rising from their graves with renewed vigor. According to cybersecurity and cloud computing firm Akamai, in the first quarter of 2024, serious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overload the target organization with fake requests, in the EMEA outstripped those in the US for the first time.
DDoS attacks are back from the dead
“DDoS attacks are back from the dead. Much of this regional shift is due to geopolitical tension, such as nation-state activities and hacktivism in response to ongoing wars, including the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars. Germany became the third most attacked country, which appears to correlate with announced support for Ukraine,” says Richard Meeus, Akamai director of security technology and strategy EMEA.
He added that immediately following Germany’s announcement of military aid, the pro-Russian hacktivist group Killnet immediately targeted government and bank services across Germany with DDoS attacks.
Another long-standing cyber threat, the human element, is a live topic at InfoSecurity Europe 2024.
Speaking from the showground floor, Javvad Malik, lead security awareness advocate at security awareness training and simulated phishing platform KnowBe4, said: “As the human layer continues to be the most enticing attack vector, criminals are showing their willingness to search for any weakness, targeting employees in both professional and personal settings. Sadly, most organizations focus on technology-based security layers while ignoring the human layer.”
Malik advocates that, in addition to keeping staff informed about the increasing sophistication of socially engineered spear-phishing attacks using innocent-looking weaponized emails, organizations take a more granular approach. Typically, this would involve implementing tools and procedures that involve automatically running any remotely suspect incoming emails past the IT department before opening them.
The message that is coming out loud and clear from the InfoSecurity Europe 2024 conference is that organizations across a growing number of sectors urgently need to up their cybersecurity game to counter the growing ingenuity and technological sophistication of today’s highly-organized criminal gangs.
