Deepfakes have been a source of concern for some time now but now there is a new threat that businesses should be aware of.

That threat is the use of deepfakes in job applications for remote IT positions. Of course, a person could just lie on their job application but deepfakes can allow a ne’er-do-well to take up an identity they create which may appear like the perfect employee. Once this deep fake employee has the job, they could cause immense damage to a company.

There have been reports of deepfake tech being used for voice calls in the past but this is the first we’re hearing of the technology being used to get a job and launch an attack internally.

Unfortunately, deepfakes aren’t easy to spot but there are some clues that you may be dealing with a fake human.

The image above is grabbed This Person Does Not Exist. This website uses a generative adversarial network to generate pictures of people that are almost believable. If the unknown mass in the right of the image wasn’t a giveaway, look at the mismatched earrings or the way the woman’s hair sort of blends and changes colour at the bridge of the nose. While deepfakes can be incredibly convincing, they can also be rather obvious as Kaspersky explains.

“Among signs of a deepfake, there are unnatural lip movements, poorly rendered hair, mismatched face shapes, little to no blinking, skin color mismatches, errors in the rendering of clothes, or a hand passing over the face,” explains lead data scientist at Kaspersky, Vladislav Tushkanov.

Unfortunately, everything Tushkanov points out, can be attributed to poor video quality as well. As such, the data scientist recommends job interviews include potential co-workers who will work directly with the new hire.

“This will increase the chances of spotting anything unusual,” says Tushkanov.

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[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]