PHILIPPINE BUSINESSES must ramp up their investments in identity verification technology as fraud schemes involving deepfakes become more prevalent, according to biometric solutions company iProov.
“The criminals aren’t going to take a lot of notice of what regulation is put in place in the Philippines or in the United States or anywhere else in the world because they’re going to break the law anyway,” Dominic Forrest, chief technology officer at iProov, said in an interview last month.
“Putting in place the technology, the people, and the processes to protect against this is going to be critical for us going forward, because the cost of not doing so is just going to be immense,” Mr. Forrest said.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) recently said it is pushing for more stringent social media regulations amid the rise of deepfakes.
The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center, an attached agency to the DICT, said it receives up to 300 deepfake incidents daily, Executive Director Alexander K. Ramos said.
According to Mr. Forrest, criminal organizations readily share their fraudulent tactics, increasing the likelihood of deepfake related scams.
“One of the things we have identified is that the criminal organizations share ways to create deepfakes for bad purposes, whether it’s to attack banks, whether it’s just to mislead on social media, whatever it is — the information about how to do that is shared globally,” he said.
iProov’s latest Threat Intelligence Report showed the growing number of attacks against identity verification measures.
Face swap attacks, which involve superimposing another person’s face to an existing video or livestream, surged by a 300% year on year in 2024, iProov said in the report.
Digital injection attacks, or the impersonation a bona fide user to gain unauthorized access to their accounts or systems, jumped by 783% last year, it added. Native virtual camera attacks, or those involving putting pre-recorded or fake videos into verification streams, also skyrocketed by 2,665% year on year.
For 2025, trends that organizations must watch out for include the continued rise of native virtual camera injections, face swaps, online attack-as-a-service communities, iProov said.
Image-to-video conversion tools can also be used to trick vulnerable liveness detection systems, it added.
“This technique transforms static images into convincing video content that could pose very significant challenges for most remote identity verification systems.” — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz
