The sophisticated deepfakes that have flooded social media not only needs a discerning eye to look through the garb but also requires proper awareness about the matter.
The spate of sophisticated deepfake videos that are being pelted, in the recent past shows one thing, for sure the level of sophistication that the nefarious elements dotting the cyberspace have started to resort to, with the sole intention of making quick money. In their endeavour to be successful, in their evil designs, these bad elements have not spared even the most powerful of figures in the political sphere and even in the corporate world. The latest victims of deepfakes that have flooded social media include names like Shri Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India; Ms Nirmala Sitharama, Union Finance Minister, Government of India; Ms Sudha Murthy, Founder-Chairperson, Infosys Foundation and Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google. The alarming fact is that the content of all of these deepfakes is very similar, an assured return which is astronomical that too on a small investment and the investment deadline is very short, so as to create a sense of urgency after doling out the bait of a high return. Athenian Tech spotted thse deepfakes and has reported the presence of them in a timey manner to the relevant authorities.
The first wave. One of the earliest documented deepfake of Sundar Pichai showed the Google top boss endorsing a platform called “Google Invest,” which was marketed as a government-backed scheme that promised returns of over ₹10 lakh a month on a one-time investment of just ₹21,000. The videos used AI-simulated speech and facial reconstruction technology to look and sound almost real. The aim of the sinister elements was to ride on the credibility of Pichai, so as to push out any iota of suspicion that may crop up.
Things get murkier. The campaign launched by the con men gradually moved from the corporate sector to even tarnish the most powerful in the political arena. They went ahead and created a deepfake of Prime Minister Modi which showed him endorsing a platform “Go Invest” as being backed by the government. They did this by did this by creating an article and in the process created a clone of Times of India, one of the hugely popular English dailies in the country. To lend credibility to their evil designs they not only preyed on te goodwill of the incumbent Prime Minister but also attempted to ride on the credibility of the one most widely read read English dailies in the country.
The con men did not stop at the Prime Minister of the country, they went ahead and even made a deepfake of Ms Nirmala Sitharaman, Union Finance Minister of India wherein she was show endorsing the same investment scheme as was shown in earlier deepfakes of Prime Minister Modi.
The new game. The latest variant of the deepfake, discovered by Athenian Tech is called “Cryptify Flows” and again it again clones the Times of India. This shows Ms Sitharaman, Narayana Murthy and Ms Sudha Murty starting a government-backed platform offering daily payouts of ₹ 1.9 lakh. The said scheme is also shown to be promoted by the State Bank of India, Microsoft and IBM to lend it technological and institutional legitimacy.
The plot. Under the shiny veneer, of these deepfakes that have flooded the social media, is a deliberate obfuscatory infrastructure. Users clicking on the embedded links, provided in the deepfakes, are redirected to fake investment portals that are hosted on servers registered outside India. Some infrastructure behind this game is even based in far flung Turkey and is even suspected to be running on Russian DNS servers, making takedown efforts difficult and allowing the operation to continue unabated.
As the report from Athenian Tech grimly concludes, misinformation is no longer spread by words alone. It is now believably performed by synthetic replicas of real people and that too powerful and influential ones. As long as the burden of detection lies only with ordinary users, the fraud machine will continue to run. The only way to thwart this menace is to create proper awareness abut such deepfakes.
