FBI warns of deepfaked remote work applicants
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center released a warning against “deepfaked” job applicants that are using stolen personal information to obtain work-from-home positions in IT, programming, data, and software industries.
The FBI said that the malicious job applications contain two alarming elements — applicants are stealing identities to obtain video job interviews and the video interviews are being manipulated to conceal the applicant’s identity.
Joseph Blankenship, Vice President and Research Director for Security and Risk at research and advisory firm Forrester, said that job applicants engineering roles as insider threats using stolen personally identifiable information could be insidious.
“If someone has managed to successfully imitate somebody with their PII and can answer questions about them, to me that says maybe the background check alone isn’t going to be enough to positively identify somebody,” he explained.
Last May, the FBI and Department of State also warned enterprises about North Korean operatives that are generating revenue for the country’s leader Kim Jong-un by obtaining remote posts in Western countries.
