It’s Armand here, reporting to you live this week from the Louvre in Paris. Finally, I’m sent to a more desirable location, as the past few weeks I’ve been hanging out in empty lots, my mom’s basement, and having to box in a ring with a highly caffeinated LabRat.
I’m at the most famous museum in the world to view DaVinci’s (perhaps overrated) masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. In this world of deep fakes and near perfect counterfeits, this appears to be the only way I can view a genuine article.
And it’s here where I’m going to make a prediction that might prove irksome to many of you: the days of work from home (WFH) may be nearing an end. “Impossible,” you say in your sweatpants while your Spotify plays at full blast in your home office. Read on and gird yourselves to buy up business hotel shares and sell your vacationland home (e.g. Cabo, Cancun, Park City) before real estate prices tumble. Perhaps even those urban doom loop scenarios will never play out, and office real estate trust companies may be saved. (Disclaimer, Tech Essentials is not a financial investment advice column).
The reason why WFH may go the way of the NFT is because of this new world of AI tech. Now, you might say this runs counter to everything you’ve been hearing and reading. However, what you’ve heard and read is BEFORE Microsoft Asia showcased their VASA-1 project, which “generates lifelike audio-driven talking faces in real time.” And, yes, they have managed to bring to life a fake Mona Lisa who can rap quite convincingly.
[The Mona Lisa now sings, created by VASA AI from one still photo. Click it to view]
You read that right. Microsoft researchers have trained this AI project on 1 million YouTube videos of 6,000 professional and entertainment speakers. This, combined with Microsoft’s ever-evolving powerful AI, has unleashed the ultimate time-saving marketing, training, and entertainment tool. But it also opens the door for nearly unlimited cybercriminal impostor trickery. You might click on the wrong Zoom link while you’re WFHing and meet up with your AI-generated fake colleagues who could trick you into revealing sensitive personal and corporate info.
With ONLY a still photo of someone (think LinkedIn headshot, website team photo, Facebook, or WhatsApp icon) plus a few seconds capturing the voice of the person (perhaps the recording of one’s outgoing voicemail message), the cybercriminal can create a live persona posing as your boss, your boss’s boss, or close family member. As the cybercriminal speaks, you would hear AND see your colleague, live in action, facial expressions and all. One can prompt the AI with tone (i.e., stern, happy, enthusiastic) and then have it conduct the scam conversation without the cybercriminal even being there.
[The above was an AI generated image of a man, with a voice, and what he is saying is typed into a keypad, he speaks in real time. Click it to view]
Maybe the scarier issue is how this all could be scaled so that many multiples of the conversations are occurring simultaneously. The AI continues to learn and improve to the extent that having video conferences or even FaceTime conversations with your Mom are deemed too risky to carry out.
This is your ultimate “life coach” or the powered up and infinitely scalable cybercriminal impostor.
Your team will not-be-fooled without powerful tools like RPost’s Eavesdropping™ AI technology. It lets you see the unseen and spy on the cybercriminal spies so you can get ahead of the intelligence gathering the cybercriminals do BEFORE they strike with, say, the “fake” you attending a Teams meeting designed to trick your team into sending money to a new bank (account of cybercriminal control). As I’ve mentioned in weeks past, RPost can empower you and your IT staff to be like the white-hat spy so you can eavesdrop on the black-hat hacker eavesdroppers—essentially, giving you visibility as to who, if, and when the cybercriminals are eavesdropping on correspondence between you and your email recipients.
If people are already fooled today by well-timed, thoroughly researched, and clearly written emails, the fooling will be orders of magnitude greater as projects like VASA-1 are rolled out.
Get ahead of this with RPost. To learn more about Eavesdropping™ and PRE-Crime protection, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more. Now I have to try and get a glimpse of the real Venus de Milo before the museum closes…
October 01, 2024
September 24, 2024
September 17, 2024
September 10, 2024
September 03, 2024