From Boston Globe
You may need a family code word now: Scammers, supercharged by AI, are coming for your password
By Beth Teitell
It sounds like the voice-over from a horror movie. But it’s straight from the website of the Department of State. “In today’s digital age,” it reads, “one of the most underestimated threats isn’t found in a computer virus or a sophisticated piece of malware — it’s in the mind.”
The mind.
Oh, yeah, that little thing — that I’m currently going out of.
I was phished recently and the experience transformed me from someone annoyed by two-factor authentication to a person so paranoid that if a website is asking me for my own name, I need to take half a Xanax and run it by a notary...
It used to be that high-profile people with large digital footprints were the ones vulnerable to having their images or voices spoofed.
But we’re all Taylor Swift now, Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, told me.
“It is now possible to steal anyone’s identity from very little information,” he said. “If you post a photo of yourself or someone gets your voicemail, they can insert you into a video or make a call with what sounds and looks like you...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
