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Illustration of a hacking. Thomas Trutschel / Photothek via Getty Images

Advances in artificial intelligence programs now make it possible to create synthetic voices that perfectly imitate real people. With a baffling ease, hackers have put into practice these new technologies of falsification of the voice to scam businesses.

If you liked the infox phenomenon, a hateful practice of flooding social networks with fake news, you'll love deepfakes. The term, so called by anglophones, is the contraction "deep learning" or "deep learning" now offered by artificial intelligence and "fake" programs, meaning that the audio and video sequences generated by these systems are false. The development of these software that work mainly in networks gave birth to many gadgets and applications on smartphones. A string of devices incorporating AI specialized in facial recognition or fingerprint verification for example, to activate his mobile. The analysis of the voice is not left aside, as evidenced by the many personal wizards with voice interface that develop the giants of the web and e-commerce.

Even the German accent is there ...

These excellent programs in voice recognition and imitation of human voices are today hackers. As this new-style 'president's scam' demonstrates, the UK subsidiary of a German energy company fell victim to it. The attackers used the synthesized voice of the leader of the group to chew employees of the company. The pirates proceeded in two stages, the dummy boss orders by telephone to a senior executive of the company to urgently transfer funds to the account of a Hungarian subcontractor. The victim of trickery at the end of the line recognizes the voice of his boss. Everything is there ! His intonations, the tone of his voice and his German accent. An email containing the information necessary to make the transfer then confirms this verbal request. The written order comes from the real web address of the big boss, except that his electronic box had been previously hacked. About 220,000 euros were thus deposited on an external account entirely managed by the attackers.

This kind of scam remains for the moment rather marginal, but the phenomenon is growing according to the specialist computer security Symantec. The audio "deepfake" is easier to implement than a video that seems likely and scams made by bogus synthetic voices are largely underestimated by companies, say experts in cybersecurity. They identified three other similar cases in which leaders' voices were imitated. One of these companies would have lost millions of dollars on a single shot of his virtual boss.