BioCatch Warns About Threat of Deepfakes with 2020 Security Predictions

BioCatch Chief Cyber Officer Uri Rivner is looking to the future with a new blog post that offers a slew of cybersecurity predictions for 2020. Most notably, Rivner warns that many forms of biometric authentication could prove to be vulnerable in 2020 as deepfake technology continues to improve.

In that regard, Rivner notes that deepfake tech is already good enough to spoof the human voice, and will soon be good enough to get past many facial recognition systems, including those with liveness detection. The software will increasingly be used to carry out identity theft, especially as selfie biometric data becomes more readily available on the dark web throughout the coming year.

Chatbots and voice assistants are expected to be amongst the most popular targets, alongside UK identity databases and FinTech companies themselves. A compromised identity database will provide hackers with a trove of information that they can use to create synthetic identities. Instead of trying to compromise an existing user account, fraudsters will increasingly opt to open a new account with stolen information to make purchases and launder money.

New account fraud will eliminate much of the criminal need for money mules, though it is often more difficult to spot because the activity is so similar to legitimate accounts.

FinTech companies, meanwhile, are not subject to the same strict regulations as their financial industry clientele, and consequently may not have the same level of security. Rivner also predicts that hackers will start going after Zelle and LiFi tech, though commercial LiFi deployment is still several years away.

Of course, BioCatch is pitching its behavioral biometric platform as a potential solution to many of those problems, including the rising threat of deepfake tech that can get past a single biometric modality. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill in an effort to develop better countermeasures for deepfake technology.  

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December 18, 2019 – by Eric Weiss