Content Item

Share the Page

Episode 10 - An Ethical Hacker on Deepfakes, Cybersecurity & Trust

In this episode of Decoding Ethics, host Jeanne Viljoen speaks with Christian Scott, a "White Hat" ethical hacker and founder of Tantalum Security, whose team tests firms' defenses against deepfake attacks. The focus is preparation rather than fear: what professional accountants, firms and business leaders need to understand about how deepfakes are changing fraud and cyber risk.

Christian traces how social engineering has moved from phishing, phone calls and text messages to AI-enabled deepfakes. Live deepfakes were still blocky and blurry in 2022, deepfakes made in advance are now nearly impossible to detect. He describes how, in authorized assessments, his team clones faces and voices to test wire transfer controls. He also walks through deal-room fraud, in which attackers swap wire instructions and route funds through bank accounts opened in someone else's name by defeating KYC checks. Other schemes he covers include deepfake extortion, market manipulation and fake kidnapping calls that use children's voices taken from social media.

On defenses, Christian explains why preventing these attacks goes far beyond multi-factor authentication, from watching for signals such as impossible travel to using identity proofing tools firms may already have. He warns that liveness checks on video calls may not hold up for long, and that verification will have to rely on knowledge, not just appearance. Above all, he argues for a culture with no exceptions to the process, backed by layered controls rather than reliance on individual employees.

The conversation closes on governance. Christian calls for transparency about where AI is used in an organization and for building governance into processes by design. For smaller firms, he recommends starting with incident response and business continuity. He leaves listeners with a question: What does trust mean for your organization, and can it be audited?

Watch the podcast here