Impersonation attacks (Mobile only)

Due to rapid increases in technological advancement, a new kind of national security threat has emerged. I have chosen to refer to it as an “impersonation attack”.

All government officials that use a telephone to issue orders are vulnerable to impersonation. Politicians,

bureaucrats, civil servants and police must recognise the vulnerability and adopt sufficient countermeasures.

Through combining “Spoofing” with “deepfake” technology an impersonation attack is very easy to achieve and not just for enemy or hostile nation states. The general public can easily acquire these capabilities. So hacktavist collectives and all the usual borderline terrorist political organisations could be a threat.

A single concerted effort could create chaos and cause huge amounts of disruption.

Spoofing

Phone spoofing is when someone disguises the number they are calling or texting from by changing their caller ID.

In so doing they hijack another persons phone number.

Phone scammers around the world have already been using this technique.

They imitate phone numbers to imitate a person or business to swindle money or acquire information.

Deepfakes

Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image, video or voice call is replaced with someone else's likeness.

Deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate visual and audio content - replicating another persons likeness with incredible accuracy.

The machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based upon deep learning.

Impersonation attack

Any time “Spoofing” a number is combined with deepfake voice generation.

Particularly on mass or as a cluster of calls.

Policy recommendation:

In order to guard against the impersonation attack, all relevant government offices must use FaceTime or equivalent video call as standard to issue each and every dictate.

Thankfully this one simple countermeasure will completely mitigate against the risk and close this major exploit.

Author: David Ian Bennett

Date published : 25th Oct 2020