Deepfake fraud is on the rise say business leaders
Over half of C-suite and other executives (51.6 percent) expect an increase in the number and size of deepfake attacks targeting their organizations' financial and accounting data in the next year.
A new Deloitte poll shows that increase could impact more than one-quarter of executives in the year ahead, as those polled report that their organizations experienced at least one (15.1 percent) or multiple (10.8 percent) deepfake financial fraud incidents during the past year.
Executives at organizations that faced deepfake financial fraud in the past year expect higher than average increases in similar events for the year ahead, with those experiencing just one fraud event expecting the biggest increase in fraud (67.1 percent). Executives at organizations experiencing multiple fraud events during the past 12 months also expect above-average increases in the year to come (59.6 percent).
"Deepfake financial fraud is rising, with bad actors increasingly leveraging illicit synthetic information like falsified invoices and customer service interactions to access sensitive financial data and even manipulate organizations' AI models to wreak havoc on financial reports," says Mike Weil, digital forensics leader and a managing director of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP. "The good news is that concern about future incidents seems to peak after the first attack, with subsequent events tempering concerns as organizations gain more experience and become better at detecting, managing and preventing fraudsters' deepfake schemes."
Surprisingly, 9.9 percent of polled executives say their organizations do nothing to guard against deepfake fraud targeting their accounting and financial data. The likelihood of using defensive technologies does, however, increase substantially with the number of attacks experienced in the past year.
Those organizations that suffered a single deepfake financial fraud incident in the previous year are most likely to increase employee education about new threats as a means of preparing their workforces (30 percent). Respondents at organizations that experienced more than one deepfake financial fraud event in the past year are more likely to establish new policies and procedures to help workforces prepare for deepfake-related fraud schemes (25.2 percent) as their primary risk approach.
"Knowledge of evolving deepfake fraud schemes is evolving quickly," adds Weil. "But as illicit actors' techniques advance, they become more impervious to human detection, technologies and tools. In the years ahead, it'll become more critical for organizations to both identify and address deepfake risks, not the least of which will be those efforts targeting potentially market-moving accounting and financial data to perpetrate fraud."
The full report is available from the Deloitte site.
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