Scams use AI to mimic senior officials' voices, FBI warns

Scammers are using artificial intelligence to impersonate senior U.S. officials, the FBI warned Thursday.

Why it matters: The impersonations show how increasingly sophisticated scammers are becoming about using artificial intelligence to exploit their targets.

• Many of the targets have been current or former government officials and their contacts, the FBI said.
• "The malicious actors have sent text messages and AI-generated voice messages — techniques known as smishing and vishing, respectively — that claim to come from a senior U.S. official in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts," the FBI alert said.
• The FBI did not immediately respond to Axios' request for more information.

Context: With seconds of audio, artificial intelligence can mimic a voice that is virtually indistinguishable from the original to the human ear.

• Scammers have weaponized voice cloning tech, and many products lack significant safeguards to prevent fraud or misuse.

Our thought bubble, from Axios' Ina Fried: It's another sign that voice cloning has become trivially easy, and that the era of deep fakes is here, not in the future.

• Security systems need to not rely on voice as a means of authentication and all people, whether government officials or grandmothers, need to not assume someone on the other end of a phone call is who they say they are.

State of play: Federal layoffs have created new target opportunities for cybercriminals and nation-state adversaries.

• Russia and China have attempted to recruit disgruntled federal employees, CNN reported in March.

Go deeper: AI voice-cloning scams: A persistent threat with limited guardrails