Voice Cloning: How Do Cybercriminals Utilize this New Hacking Technique?
Voice Cloning – the New Frontier for Cybercriminals
The world of technology and AI has grown to the maximum level of complexity. The risk that black-hat hackers have been posing to both individuals and firms has been increasing. Adding on, the growing amount of sophistication of the technology and algorithms has given room for multiple hackers to perform malicious activities. Today, voice cloning has become a new hack to get access to private information.
Cybercriminals have been working tirelessly behind the scenes and coming up with different and advanced ways of staying ahead of the authorities. Their only goal is to indulge in cyber hack activities in such a manner, that under no circumstance, they get traced by cyber experts.
Is Voice Cloning a Growing Cyberthreat?
As per security researchers, cybercriminals are becoming more innovative and using cutting-edge technologies like voice cloning for their cyber attacks. Employing Deepfake technology, a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, these criminals replace the voices of people to tamper with information. Darren Thomas, Cybercube’s Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, says that voice cloning is economically feasible for such criminals, and therefore, this can transform into a severe threat in the next two years.
Voice cloning almost perfectly mimics the voice of a person, and hackers can even manipulate the voice to convey emotions. With only 5-minute audio of a person’s voice, these criminals can create an almost perfect clone. Government agencies, legislators, and social media platforms are trying their best to counter the use of Deepfakes and are conducting investigations. Cybercriminals can use voice cloning for malicious intentions like influencing election campaigns, creating fake news, and for financial fraud
What is Voice Clonings and How Do Cybercriminals Utilize the New Hacking Technique?
Voice cloning or deep fake voicing is the newest method cybercriminals use to hack various systems that have voice-related controlling options. Privacy and security of individuals are on the line since hackers are getting more advanced these days. Not only are the methods getting advanced, but there has also been a sudden upsurge in the misuse of such data, which has led to individuals getting exposed to their personal information for no reason at all.
Software companies and application developers have still found no way to stop the hacking technique of voice cloning, seemingly harming the database that various companies hold containing sensitive information about individuals like name, address, bank account details, and much more. Hackers have found a smooth way to mislead people on the internet through wrong and harmful information. On the other hand, people get easily lured towards this information and end up giving away personal information and find themselves scammed and looted online.
How is Voice Cloning Done Through Deep Fake?
Deep fake is a term that originates from the combination of “deep learning” and “fake.” Deep learning is the backbone, and hence it has originated an action named deep fake. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has an enormous contribution to modern-day hacking methods. It analyses a target image and keeps analyzing it through different angles until it recreates an actual copy of it.
The same goes with voice. When voice cloning is done, every bit of the voice is analyzed, starting from the modulations, sound variations, tones, and even how words sound from the individual’s voice. This tracking is done until the voice is entirely coned and ready to use at other places. Eventually, it is used to deep dive into individual databases that contain all sorts of sensitive information.
How to Tell that a Voice is Cloned?
Though voice cloning is a very intricate method as all bits of the voice seem copied. But there is some difference between a cloned voice and an original voice. When a particular voice is cloned at certain places, you can find minute differences by listening to it closely. There are minute yet noticeable differences in a copied voice since deep faking uses remote and distant online Artificial Intelligence methods to copy the voice variations. Since it is done remotely and online, there are errors and loopholes. Copying them exactly needs close presence, which is impossible, while deep faking is done to clone a voice.
Moreover, in certain places where videos are played with cloned voices, lip-syncing is a significant issue that is pretty much noticeable. There is no close similarity with the words spoken with the movement of the lips. Thus, if close monitoring is done, it is not as hard to point out cloning issues and the use of deep fake.
Is Voice Cloning and Deep Faking Alarming
Voice cloning has already taken a high toll in the world. Hackers are devising more and more ways to use deep fake and Artificial Intelligence to perform voice cloning. This is helping them to break into even the most secure databases of renowned companies in the world. They are eventually blowing out all the information and using it to harm people online. Since all of it is done online, tracking them is becoming highly difficult.
They are so very cleverly devised with technology that they are changing their identities every second. It is getting even more challenging for cyber officials to track them or even search for their primary identity and location. This has led to widespread disruption of database security, and more and more software firms and companies are coming up with data theft and fraud issues.
It is a primary weapon for hackers to use and disrupt elections in various countries whereby Artificial Intelligence is used to scam through the proceedings. The use of unfair means has exponentially increased.
Top political parties who are hungry for power deploy these types of hackers to hack into systems, change normal operations, and use voice cloning to undermine the reputation of opponent parties.
What Is Not Alarming About Deep Fake and Voice Cloning?
A reputed videography company ran a detailed study on the processes of deep faking and video cloning. Their results showed humanity some positivity as they followed the same method which hackers follow to clone voices. They reported that it took nearly three months to clone a voice with all the technology they had succeeded. Indeed, this was positive news as cyber departments have enough time to devise methods to eventually prevent this crime.
Thus, users should also be equally careful while putting in personal information online since it is uncertain whether it is safe. It is better to take necessary precautions rather than falling into a big trap.
Conclusion
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