Risks from AI deepfakes are growing, says cybersecurity CEO whose voice was used to defraud his own employees – Capital Brief

Jay ChaudhryFounder of a $30 billion ($44.4 billion) cybersecurity company Zscaleris aware of the growing risks posed by deep fakes using artificial intelligence. Finally, a fraudster used Chaudhry’s voice to defraud one of its own employees.

“There was a situation where someone called one of our salespeople with my voice and said, ‘This is Jay,’” Chaudhry said Capital Brief during a trip to Sydney. The scammer quickly hung up and sent a text message saying, “Hey, I’m in a bad zone, I can’t speak…please buy 10 of these gift cards.”

The hapless subordinate, convinced that his company’s CEO had made the request, ended up spending $1,500 on gift cards. Chaudhry laughed it off because it could have been a lot worse. And he expects it to get a lot worse.

“We have to be paranoid about this,” said Chaudhry, who was in Australia to discuss Zscaler’s integration with Google Chrome Enterprise and a partnership with NVIDIA that uses generative AI to analyze corporate data and identify threats and vulnerabilities.

Generative AI has changed the cybersecurity threat landscape over the past two years. This is not because chatbots can generate malicious code—malware has been available cheaply or for free on internet forums for a decade—but because artificial intelligence improves the social engineering capabilities of fraudsters.