Crazy. A 20-year-old from Tzur Yitzhak opened bank accounts in the names of people he had never met, ordered credit cards in their names and withdrew money from
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Crazy. A 20-year-old from Tzur Yitzhak opened bank accounts in the names of people he had never met, ordered credit cards in their names and withdrew money from hundreds of citizens. What's surprising in this story is that he didn't actually break into any system - he simply used AI with his creative mind to deceive the system based on how it was designed to work.
How did it happen?
In the past two years banks in Israel have allowed opening an account through an app without coming to a branch. Identification is based on a live video, a selfie photo and a photo of an ID card. This was built for convenience, and it works great, as long as whoever films the video is truly a real person.
What this suspect did was take photos from breached data repositories he bought online, animate them with AI into videos and selfie photos that look like a living person, and pass all the bank's identification stages without any system raising a flag. He even operated AI agents that carried out some of the actions in his place in order to distance himself from the scene.
The judge wrote that "this is an example of the expected future in the world of cybercrime".
Verification systems designed two years ago were built on the assumption that a live video is proof that a real person is on the other side. Only two years have passed and that assumption no longer stands up to reality.
Every verification process that relies on something that used to be hard to fake and is now easy to generate with AI is in effect an open door that hasn't been closed yet. The challenges of AI are taking the entire security world to the edge at a pace not yet seen, and are met at every level - open source projects are breached, companies are breached, accounts are breached, and no one is innocent
The article in Calcalist: