AI voice and video generation has become cheap and easy, so business email compromise has evolved into phone and video calls that use a real executive’s voice and face, modelled from a few minutes of public footage.
Common patterns
- A call to finance in the CEO’s voice demanding an urgent transfer “to close a confidential deal”
- Group video calls in which every other participant is synthetic
- Impersonating IT to get staff to read out OTP codes or approve MFA prompts
How to defend
- Require every transfer or change of payee to be confirmed through a second channel, calling back a number already on file
- Agree internal code words for unusual instructions
- Limit the amount any one person can approve
- Train finance and executive assistants with realistic deepfake simulations
Trend analysis by the Cybershield Threat Intelligence team.
