How a Deepfake CFO Stole $25M from My Company — And Why Your Firewalls Are Useless
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The video call froze. Our CFO, Maria, stared coldly from the screen. “Authorize the $25M transfer now. The acquisition depends on it.” Her lip twitched — a micro-expression I’d never seen. Thirty seconds later, the money vanished. The real Maria? On vacation, phone off. We’d been deepfaked by AI clones trained on her TED Talk.
Welcome to the terrifying new era of cyber warfare.
The Attack:
Hackers scraped 37 minutes of Maria’s public videos. Used tools like OpenAI’s VASA-1 to:
- Clone her voice (tone, pauses, accent)
- Animate her face with real-time lip sync
- Inject “urgent” vocal stress patterns
Why it worked:
- No malware. No phishing links. Just psychological warfare.
- Our $500K MFA system? Useless against “trusted” human faces.
The Aftermath:
We recovered $9M. The rest funded a North Korean crypto-mining operation.