FBI Warns That People Are Using Deepfakes To Slither Into Job Positions

Photo 238213812 © Ukrainian photographer Valery Kazlitsinau | Dreamstime.com

Here’s one downside of the remote-work era. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reported a rise of complaints about people who are applying for tech job positions using deepfaked videos and voice manipulators.

Embellishing resumés, although frowned upon, isn’t uncommon in the workforce—but these cybercriminals push this to a whole new level. Taking to its Internet Crime Complaint Center on Tuesday, the FBI noted that impersonators are even using Personally Identifiable Information (PII) stolen from Americans to get hired in remote work or work-from-home roles in the fields of IT, computer programming, database, and software.

They’d also use voice-spoofing techniques to sound like somebody else, the bureau elaborated.

It’s not a matter of the candidates being too shy to show their real faces. As TechCrunch details, there could be a chance that these applicants can’t get jobs in the US. But even more insidiously (and likely), they’re malicious hackers hoping to gain access to confidential information about companies and their clients.

The FBI disclosed that a lot of the job listings were for positions with access to sensitive employee or customer data, in addition to financial and confidential company info. Hiring these fakers could leave companies vulnerable to massive data breaches.

Accordingly, recruiters sensed that things were amiss when the candidate coughed or sneezed, as these actions were not replicated by their digital copies.

“In these interviews, the actions and lip movement of the person seen interviewed on-camera do not completely coordinate with the audio of the person speaking. At times, actions such as coughing, sneezing, or other auditory actions are not aligned with what is presented visually,” authorities explained.

The FBI is now urging employers who are suspicious of such activity to file a report. 

[via Gizmodo, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, cover photo 238213812 © Ukrainian photographer Valery Kazlitsinau | Dreamstime.com]