British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

Re:British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake ... by ajsnigrutin on Monday May 20, 2024 @10:54AM (#40416201)

I co-own a lot smaller company, so it was more in a range of 4 figures (euros), but more than once I've been in a situation where I've just signed a deal for some business with some company, called one of the 'hardware guys' from the car (external companies that eg. import hardware, are distributers for lenovo/dell, whatever), got an offer for a set of hardware that we needed (a few servers, etc.), forwarded the email to our ceo, called him (without faked AI voice in my case... for now), told him "pay this today, so we can get them by the end of the month", and he did.

If someone knew I was negotiating some business that day, phished an email with whatever account number he wanted and AI faked my voice, he'd get the money transfered.

So yeah... another thing to worry about.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake ... by lesuorac on Monday May 20, 2024 @01:09PM (#40417627)

It would be nice if the article had additional details.

Did the email come from within their own domain? Like a properly set-up domain isn't going to let you spoof their employees so your emails to the CEO will be authoritative since they came from the correct domain (assume your CEO checks its ycombinator.com and not ycombimator.com).

At 4k though I suspect it's not that worthy of a target when you can do the same effort to net 25 million. Although I'm a bit surprised there isn't some internal page to add/remove the hardware requests so that it can be easily accounted for by accounting.

[ Parent | on HN ]