Hackers Voice Cloned the CEO of LastPass for Attack

In a new blog post from LastPass, the password management firm used by countless personal and corporate clients to help protect their login information, the company explains that someone used AI voice-cloning tech to spoof the voice of its CEO in an attempt to trick one of its employees.

As the company writes in the post, one of its employees earlier this week received several WhatsApp communications — including calls, texts, and a voice message — from someone claiming to be its CEO, Karim Toubba. Luckily, the LastPass worker didn't fall for it because the whole thing set off so many red flags.

"As the attempted communication was outside of normal business communication channels and due to the employee’s suspicion regarding the presence of many of the hallmarks of a social engineering attempt (such as forced urgency)," the post reads, "our employee rightly ignored the messages and reported the incident to our internal security team so that we could take steps to both mitigate the threat and raise awareness of the tactic both internally and externally."

As the company noted in its blog post, these sorts of attacks are on the rise. In fact, a Hong Kong tech worker ended up paying out $25 million to a scammer earlier this year who'd used deepfake technology to make a video impersonating not only his company's CEO, but several other people who worked with him, too.

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