As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more advanced, the practice of deepfaking becomes a more serious threat to security online. A proper understanding of deepfaking will inevitably bring someone to a greater understanding of the social sciences. This is because every part of the deepfake discussion and process is in some way related to the complex interpersonal network known as society. To study this scientifically, therefore, is to engage in the social sciences.
Deepfaking is the method of using AI to impersonate a specific individual. This individual is usually someone the target is likely to listen to such as a politician or family member. By pretending to be someone important to a target, deepfakers can extract money and political favors from their victims. Alternatively, they could collect information and access so they can make even more off money from a victim later on. This can be done by selling the information to third parties or stealing it outright.
The hypothesis of the article is that the development of deepfake technology will have serious ramifications for the future of cybersecurity. This hypothesis is a sensible one with a decent amount of backing to it. Deepfakes allow threat actors to do a lot more than they would be able to with other social engineering technologies.
The authors of this article interviewed experts on the field in order to inform their stance on deepfake technology and its relationship with the Metaverse. These experts came from private and government organizations in South Korea with an interest in the Metaverse. In addition to consulting experts, the authors also searched for pre-existing articles to add to the primary points of the article. The experts provided abundant information on the topic, the information gained from their interviews filling up much of the article. This included a way to prevent deepfake attacks involving a capable guardian watching over the transaction. The authors did not do any research into this topic themselves, instead trusting people believed to be well-versed in the Metaverse and its relationship with deepfake technology.
People who do not have much experience with computers or access to the information needed to disprove an impersonation are the ones most likely to fall victim to deepfake scams. Prevalent in this group are the elderly, who did not grow up using computer technology and are therefore less likely to be aware of the social engineering tactics used by threat actors and how to counter them. Lower income individuals are also important to note here for a similar reason. Many are new to computer technology and are therefore equally unsavvy in regards to interactions with potentially malicious individuals online. Lower income individuals are also more likely to fall for scams involving money conducted with deepfake technology due to the common feeling of desperation. When someone cannot feed their children or afford rent, oftentimes there is no such thing as “too good to be true” in their mind.
The factors mentioned above make the elderly and poor more prone to victimization by social engineering and threat actors know this. As a result, the elderly are often targeted by scammers due to their perception as an easy target. This frequent targeting means that more people are scammed out of money or information, reinforcing the threat actors’ view and contributing to a vicious cycle of deceit and thievery.
This study contributes to society by making the general public more aware of a rising social engineering threat. While the Metaverse may not be the most popular platform, many of the ideas contained within this article can easily be applied to the internet as a whole. On YouTube, for example, it is not uncommon to see videos where an AI impersonating the president is talking about the money one can make by visiting an individual website. To those aware of deepfakes, these videos are obviously scams, but unfortunately that is not the majority of the internet’s population or else these schemes would not be profitable enough to warrant buying the advertisement slot for the videos that feed into them.