{"id":67768,"date":"2025-01-06T12:49:01","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T04:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/?p=67768"},"modified":"2025-01-06T12:49:02","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T04:49:02","slug":"trend-micro-predicts-emergence-of-deepfake-powered-malicious-digital-twins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/2025\/01\/06\/trend-micro-predicts-emergence-of-deepfake-powered-malicious-digital-twins\/","title":{"rendered":"Trend Micro predicts emergence of deepfake-powered malicious digital twins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Trend Micro Incorporated, a global cybersecurity player, warned that highly customized, AI-powered attacks could supercharge scams, phishing and influence operations in 2025 and beyond.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to Jon Clay, VP of Threat Intelligence at Trend Micro:\u00a0&#8220;As generative AI makes its way ever deeper into enterprises and the societies they serve, we need to be alert to the threats. Hyper-personalized attacks and\u00a0agent AI subversion\u00a0will require industry-wide effort to root out and address. Business leaders should remember that there&#8217;s no such thing as standalone cyber risk today. All security risk is ultimately business risk, with the potential to impact future strategy profoundly.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Trend&#8217;s 2025 predictions report warns of the potential for malicious &#8220;digital twins,&#8221; where breached\/leaked personal information (PII) is used to train an LLM to mimic the knowledge, personality, and writing style of a victim\/employee. When deployed in combination with deepfake video\/audio and compromised biometric data, they could be used to convince identity&nbsp;fraud&nbsp;or to &#8220;honeytrap&#8221; a friend, colleague, or family member.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Deepfakes and AI could also be leveraged in large-scale, hyper-personalized attacks to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Enhance business compromise (BEC\/BPC) and &#8220;fake employee&#8221; scams at scale.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Identify pig butchering victims.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Lure and romance these victims before handing them off to a human operator, who can chat via the &#8220;personality filter&#8221; of an LLM.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Improved open-source intelligence gathering by adversaries.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Capability development in pre-attack prep will improve attack success.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Create authentic-seeming social media personas at scale to spread mis\/disinformation and scams.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Elsewhere, businesses that adopt AI in greater numbers in 2025 will need to be on the lookout for threats such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Vulnerability exploitation and hijacking of AI agents to manipulate them into performing harmful or unauthorized actions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Unintended information leakage (from GenAI)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Benign or malicious system resource consumption by AI agents, leading to denial of service.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Outside the world of AI threats<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The report highlights additional areas for concern in 2025, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vulnerabilities<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Memory management and memory corruption bugs, vulnerability chains, and exploits targeting APIs<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>More\u00a0container escapes<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Older, simpler vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injections<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The potential for a single vulnerability in a widely adopted system to ripple across multiple models and manufacturers, such as a connected vehicle ECU<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Ransomware<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Threat actors will respond to advances in endpoint detection and response (EDR) tooling by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Creating kill chains that use locations where most EDR tools aren&#8217;t installed (e.g., cloud systems or mobile, edge, and IoT devices)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Disabling AV and EDR altogether<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Using bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) techniques.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Hiding shellcodes inside inconspicuous loaders<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Redirecting Windows subsystem execution to compromise EDR\/AV detection.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The result will be faster attacks with fewer steps in the kill chain that are harder to detect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Time for action<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In response to these escalating threats and an expanding corporate attack surface, Trend recommends:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Implementing a risk-based approach to cybersecurity, enabling centralized identification of diverse assets and effective risk assessment\/prioritization\/mitigation<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Harnessing AI to assist with threat intelligence, asset profile management, attack path prediction, and remediation guidance\u2014ideally from a single platform.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Updating user training and awareness in line with recent AI advances and how they enable cybercrime.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Monitoring and securing AI technology against abuse, including security for input and response validation or actions generated by AI<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>For LLM security: hardening sandbox environments, implementing strict data validation, and deploying multi-layered defenses against prompt injection<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Understanding the organization&#8217;s position within the supply chain, addressing vulnerabilities in public-facing servers, and implementing multi-layered defenses within internal networks<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Facilitating end-to-end visibility into AI agents<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Implementing Attack Path Prediction to mitigate cloud threats<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong>To read Trend Micro&#8217;s cybersecurity predictions for 2025,\u00a0The Easy Way In\/Out: Securing The Artificial Future, visit:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/vinfo\/us\/security\/research-and-analysis\/predictions\/the-artificial-future-trend-micro-security-predictions-for-2025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/vinfo\/us\/security\/research-and-analysis\/predictions\/the-artificial-future-trend-micro-security-predictions-for-2025<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/trend-micro-predicts-emergence-of-deepfake-powered-malicious-digital-twins-302332058.html#\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trend&#8217;s 2025 predictions report warns of the potential for malicious &#8220;digital twins,&#8221; where breached\/leaked personal information (PII) is used to train an LLM to mimic the knowledge, personality, and writing style of a victim\/employee. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":47557,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[286,54,2103,432],"class_list":["post-67768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines","tag-it-security","tag-security","tag-security-breach","tag-trend-micro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67768"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67780,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67768\/revisions\/67780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}