The impersonation side of this problem is being amplified by a specific development that has moved faster than most enterprises can track: synthetic identity generation at scale.
Piotr Wojtyla, who leads Threat Intel at Abnormal AI, has been tracking North Korean IT worker activity and the emerging playbook of getting malicious actors hired into organizations through fabricated personas. The deepfake technology enabling this is improving rapidly. "The voice is a little off, the deepfake persona versus the actual human behind it—those things sometimes don't line up. But that technology is only going to be as bad as it is today. Weeks from now, months from now, it's only going to get better."
Wojtyla's bigger concern isn't the current state of the technology. It's what happens when threat actors with serious destructive capability start using the same technique. "The North Koreans are mostly in it to get paid. Now imagine Scattered Spider, Shiny Hunters—instead of picking up their phone and calling someone to get access to an identity, they actually decide to get hired. They get the laptop. They get connected to your network. And they will now ransom from the inside of your organization."
