ZeroHour
DashboardNewsCVEsExploitsIncidentsAIBriefAnalyticsEntitiesWatchlistIOCsAsk the feedSourcesFeeds & APIKiosk mode

Search: “deepfakes”

100 stories

Searchkeywordsmart Sortlatesthotimportancerelevance
DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllExploit / PoC 3230Ransomware 1362Policy & legal 881Data breach 695Malware 521Phishing & fraud 509Threat actor 498Vulnerability 480Industry 75AI safety & security 41Advisory 22Research 17AI research 12AI policy 11
SeverityAllcritical 7277high 349medium 291low 353info 102

I’ve been deepfaked: What do I do?

ESET outlines steps for deepfake victims: preserving evidence, using platform reporting tools, and legal remedies like the US TAKE IT DOWN Act and StopNCII.org.

ESET published a how-to guide for people who discover deepfakes of themselves, covering evidence preservation, platform-specific reporting on Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X, and escalation to publishers or data protection regulators. It notes the US TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and requires 48-hour takedowns, while UK and EU laws add creation offenses and GDPR Article 17 erasure rights. Services like StopNCII.org and TakeItDown.NCMEC.org hash images so participating platforms such as Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and X can find and remove matching copies.

ESET WeLiveSecurity · 14d agoAI safety & security1

New York Seizes 12 Celebrity Deepfake Websites

Manhattan DA seized 12 deepfake sites that turned ~1,200 people's photos into non-consensual intimate imagery, the largest such seizure.

The New York District Attorney seized 12 websites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery of roughly 1,200 people, including politicians, actors, athletes, and influencers, calling it the largest seizure of such sites in history. DA Alvin Bragg cited New York's 2023 law criminalizing sexually explicit deepfakes. The action follows federal seizures of two deepfake domains in June and the 2025 shutdown of MrDeepfakes, and precedes a 15-year sentence in the first Take It Down Act conviction.

404 Media · 1d agoPolicy & legal 2 sources

Safe word: What is it and why do you need one?

ESET recommends pre-agreed family safe words to counter AI voice-clone scams such as virtual kidnapping, as one-in-four Americans report receiving deepfake calls.

ESET outlines how scammers use just seconds of audio scraped from social media or work content to create convincing voice clones, with a Hiya report finding one-in-four Americans received a deepfake voice call in the past 12 months. Common schemes include virtual kidnapping calls mixing cloned voices with sobbing and background noise. A pre-agreed, non-OSINT-discoverable safe word, plus callback verification via known numbers and 2FA, reduces success rates of these frauds.

ESET WeLiveSecurity · 7d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Manhattan DA takes down 12 AI deepfake porn sites

Manhattan DA seized domains of 12 AI deepfake porn sites hosting non-consensual videos of more than 1,200 people; investigation continues.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the seizure of domain names for 12 deepfake pornography sites that hosted AI-generated sexual videos of more than 1,200 real people, many of them celebrities. Bragg cited domestic violence cases where partners threatened to release deepfake images, and declined to say whether arrests or charges would follow. The DA's office will monitor for attempts to revive the sites on new domains.

The Record · 1d agoPolicy & legal1

Adaptive Gated Deepfake Detection for Low-Resolution and Resource-Constrained Environments

AdaGate-DF routes deepfake detection by image quality through dual multi-exit gates, hitting 0.9370 AUC on Celeb-DF with low inference latency.

AdaGate-DF is an adaptive gated deepfake detection framework that uses image-quality cues to send high-quality images through earlier exits, saving compute in resource-constrained settings. On Celeb-DF it achieves an AUC of 0.9370, outperforming MaD-CoRN and DefakeHop++, and reaches 0.9708 at 384x384 resolution. On FaceForensics++ it remains effective under class imbalance while balancing uncertainty-aware prediction and computational efficiency.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

Subtlefakes: Slightly Altered Nonconsensual AI Images Are Taking Over X

404 Media documents 'subtlefakes' — near-realistic AI-edited nonconsensual celebrity images on X spread by engagement-farming accounts, including images of actor Xochitl Gomez.

The article describes a rising trend of 'subtlefakes': AI-generated or lightly edited images of celebrities made more revealing or provocative without nudity, posted by verified engagement-farming accounts that earn revenue from X's impressions-based payouts. Actor Xochitl Gomez shared side-by-side comparisons showing real parking-lot and red-carpet photos altered into suggestive poses. The author argues these images are hard to detect and moderate because they avoid nudity, bypassing guardrails in mainstream generators, and notes some were made with X's own Grok.

404 Media · 27d agoAI safety & security1

Phishing 3.0: The Fight Moves to Agent Versus Agent

Agentic AI transforms phishing economics, enabling personalized multi-channel attacks with deepfakes like the $25M Arup deepfake heist.

The article argues phishing has evolved through three stages: from malicious content, to intent-based BEC, to AI-powered multi-channel campaigns where attacker agents autonomously conduct reconnaissance and generate tailored lures. The widely reported Arup case saw a deepfake video call impersonating colleagues convince an employee to approve transfers worth roughly $25 million. An Osterman Research study of 128 security leaders found 88% experienced trust-undermining incidents, while Microsoft 365 EOP and Google Workspace were measured missing hundreds of phishing messages per 100 mailboxes monthly. The author argues defenders must adopt their own agents to match attacker speed.

The Hacker News · 28d agoPhishing & fraud2

Harnessing CLIP and DINO: An Uncertainty-Aware Cascaded Fusion Network for Generalizable Deepfake Image Detection

UCF-Net fuses CLIP and DINO features with entropy-based uncertainty weighting to improve generalizable deepfake image detection across generators.

Researchers propose UCF-Net, an uncertainty-aware cascaded fusion network that combines CLIP's language-aligned semantic priors with DINO's self-supervised visual-structure priors for deepfake detection. It aggregates hierarchical features across transformer depths via layer-wise expert modules and performs weighted fusion driven by entropy-derived uncertainty. The authors consolidate public deepfake datasets into a unified benchmark of roughly 4 million images plus a cross-generator set of over 8,000 faces from eight recent generators, where UCF-Net achieves the best mean AUC among evaluated methods, though zero-shot transfer remains challenging.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

The Future of Deepfakes and the Decline of Reality (With Hany Farid)

GetReal cofounder and PhotoDNA developer Hany Farid discusses deepfake detection and how AI-generated media is blurring perceptions of reality.

404 Media's podcast episode features Hany Farid, cofounder of deepfake detection company GetReal and developer of the PhotoDNA perceptual hashing algorithm, discussing deepfakes and AI-generated images. The conversation reflects on how the technology has evolved since 2017 and speculates on where detection and perceptions of reality are headed. The episode is part of 404 Media's interview series for subscribers.

404 Media · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

What Makes Adversarial Examples Transfer Across Deepfake Detectors?

A controlled study of 60 deepfake detectors shows adversarial example transfer depends heavily on source-target compatibility, with source averaging understating vulnerability.

The study evaluates adversarial example transferability across 60 deepfake detectors spanning six backbones, two pretraining regimes, and five training-data configurations, using AutoAttack (AA) and Carlini-Wagner with Expectation over Transformation (CW-EOT). Transfer rises sharply when source and target share an exact backbone, architecture family, pretraining regime, or training data, with the dominant factor depending on the attack. Mean attack success rate is 7.21% under AA and 19.52% under CW-EOT for single sources, while a multi-source oracle reaches 64.48% after excluding exact matches, showing source averaging can substantially understate target vulnerability. The authors release 240,000 adversarially perturbed images, pairwise transfer results, detector configurations, and evaluation code.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security

Deep-Fake CAPTCHA: Mitigating Next-Generation Social Engineering Attacks

Researchers propose DF-CAPTCHA, a challenge-response defense that verifies callers in voice and video to defeat real-time deepfake impersonation in social engineering.

The DF-CAPTCHA framework prompts call participants with simple challenge-response tasks that are easy for humans but hard for real-time deepfake systems to convincingly generate. Responses are verified on four criteria: realism, identity consistency, task completion, and response time. User studies and experiments with real-time deepfake models across audio and video modalities show substantially improved detection over passive artifact-based methods.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch1

AI is exposing a security structure built for yesterday’s threats

EY's Jeffrey Sallet argues AI-driven deepfakes and impersonation require integrating cybersecurity, physical security, HR and legal functions.

The opinion piece contends AI-powered impersonation, deepfakes and automated social engineering cross digital, physical and operational boundaries that siloed security programs cannot cover. It cites an EY survey of 250 corporate leaders where only 12% feel most prepared to detect a targeted physical attack, and describes transnational groups using deepfakes and stolen identities to bypass virtual HR hiring loops. The author urges unified cross-functional verification pipelines and shared threat intelligence between CISOs and chief security officers.

CSO Online · 1d agoIndustry

2026 Cyber Insurance Trends Report: What's Changed and What You Need to Know

Huntress survey: CIRCIA reporting mandates now live, BEC claims exceed ransomware, exfiltration-heavy attacks cost twice as much, premiums rising.

Huntress's 2026 cyber insurance trends report, based on its own survey, finds 79% of respondents carry cyber insurance while 58% report shrinking coverage over five years. New CIRCIA federal reporting mandates and EU NIS2 requirements are reshaping policies, business email compromise now drives more claims than ransomware, and data exfiltration has replaced encryption as the dominant ransomware tactic at roughly twice the cost. After three years of declining premiums, rates are climbing again, and most businesses now refuse to pay ransoms.

Huntress · 14d agoIndustry1

AI is making fraud harder to spot and identity harder to prove

Experian's 2026 report finds AI-generated scams, deepfakes and synthetic identities spreading across digital channels, pushing businesses toward adaptive identity verification and 'Know Your Agent' checks.

Experian's 2026 US Identity & Fraud Report, based on consumer and business surveys, found 60% of consumers aware of AI-generated image/video scams, 53% of AI phishing, and 47% of deepfake voice impersonation. 80% of US businesses already use machine learning or generative AI in fraud management, while AI chatbot account openings rose from 16% in 2025 to 27%. The report highlights adaptive authentication, behavioral biometrics, and emerging 'Know Your Agent' controls as AI agents begin acting on behalf of customers.

Help Net Security · 27d agoPhishing & fraud

Microsoft’s new AI ‘code of conduct’ tells models not to hack systems or trick humans

Microsoft published an AI code of conduct barring its MAI models from cyberattacks, deepfakes, and evading human oversight.

Microsoft released an AI code of conduct defining values and safety constraints for training its MAI models, including "absolute constraints" forbidding cyberattacks, nuclear weapons, and deepfake production. Each model's conduct code overrides individual user preferences or task instructions, with provisions against mechanisms that defeat human oversight. The document predicts superintelligent AI within a decade, and Satya Nadella endorsed frontier pacing and embedded evaluators alongside Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI safety & security

First ‘Take It Down Act’ Sentencing Puts Man Behind Bars for 15 Years

Ohio man James Strahler gets the first US Take It Down Act sentence: 15 years for distributing real and AI-generated abuse imagery.

James Strahler, 38, became the first person convicted under the Take It Down Act, receiving a 15-year federal prison sentence after investigators found more than 3,000 real and AI-generated abuse images across his devices, including over 700 he posted online. He pleaded guilty to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse, and publication of digital forgeries after victims received threats, extortion demands, and AI-fabricated explicit images; the FBI took over the case in June. The federal law, which took effect in May, criminalizes knowingly publishing or threatening to publish nonconsensual intimate imagery, and free-speech advocates have criticized its 48-hour platform removal window as a censorship risk.

404 Media · 7d agoPolicy & legal

DF26: We Cannot Tell Fake From Real Anymore

DF26 benchmark shows humans and state-of-the-art deepfake detectors perform near chance on videos generated by seven modern text-to-video models.

Researchers introduce DF26, a benchmark of 271 real and 2,420 fully synthetic videos created by seven modern video generation models, all depicting single-person public-speaking scenarios such as direct-to-camera recordings, official statements, and studio interviews. Human viewers and state-of-the-art deepfake detectors scored close to random chance at distinguishing fakes from real footage. The authors argue current evaluation protocols are insufficient and call for benchmarks that explicitly measure robustness to modern generative model distribution shifts.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Self-improving AI should slow down, von der Leyen tells EU lawmakers

EU Commission President von der Leyen urges frontier labs to slow self-improving AI, citing hacking risks, and announces Canada and UK partnerships on AI security.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the Union address to call for slowing self-recursive frontier AI, warning that models in development will enable hacking at previously unimagined levels. She announced joint work with Canada and the UK on model evaluation, verification, early warning, and AI security, and proposed widening the CETA trade agreement into an alliance covering AI, quantum technology, and cyber and economic security. She defended the EU AI Act as central to guardrails, promised initiatives for health, transport, agrifood, manufacturing, and defense in November, and backed an EU Kids Act barring social media for children under 13.

Help Net Security · 5h agoAI policy

Cybersecurity M&A Roundup: 33 Deals Announced in August 2026

SecurityWeek tallied 33 cybersecurity M&A deals announced in August 2026, headlined by Visa's $2.4B BioCatch buy and Munich Re's $575M At-Bay acquisition.

Thirty-three cybersecurity M&A deals were announced in August 2026. The largest include Visa acquiring fraud-detection firm BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash and Munich Re buying cyber insurtech At-Bay for $575 million through its HSB unit. Fortinet acquired AI security company Virtue AI, Palo Alto Networks bought agentic workflow platform Console, Cribl acquired AI-native SOC startup Radiant Security, and Deel bought deepfake-detection firm Clarity for a reported $40-50 million. Brinqa, Datavault AI, Echo, and Kiteworks also announced acquisitions.

SecurityWeek · 6d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: June 9, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at firms like Lockheed Martin, ByteDance, Nordic Semiconductor, and General Motors across AppSec, cloud, and compliance.

A June 2026 roundup aggregates cybersecurity openings spanning application security, cloud security, compliance, reverse engineering, and deepfake forensics across the US, UK, Israel, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, India, and Canada. Most listed positions are marked as no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 9d agoIndustry1

The Money Mule Solution: What Every Scam Has in Common

CYBERA's money mule intelligence, now in Recorded Future's Payment Fraud Intelligence, targets the shared exit point of $450B-$1T annual scam losses.

Scams, especially authorized push payment fraud, do not require a breach; Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimated ~$450B in 2025 losses while CYBERA co-founder Claudio Staub puts the real figure near $1 trillion when underreporting is counted. Every scam needs a mule account to receive funds, so CYBERA uses agentic personas to engage active scammers and extract verified mule account details before payments occur, now available as an add-on to Recorded Future's Payment Fraud Intelligence. CYBERA collected over 16,000 confirmed mule accounts across 72 countries in H2 2025, finding 28% remained active 30 days or more after identification, including one account in 25 engagements. In Europe 51% of mule accounts sat at neobanks and fintechs, while outside Europe 69% were at major banks; regulatory pressure like the UK's APP reimbursement mandate is raising the stakes for institutions.

Recorded Future · 17d agoPhishing & fraud

Week in review: Salesforce and ServiceNow portals exposed for 17 months, exploited Metabase 0-day

Weekly digest: exploited Metabase zero-day breached Framework; Salesforce/ServiceNow portals read for 17 months; Microsoft patched 400+ flaws.

Help Net Security's week in review aggregates top stories: a 'City-Forum' campaign tracked by Reco has been pulling records from Salesforce and ServiceNow portals worldwide for 17 months, and Framework suffered a breach via an exploited Metabase zero-day exposing customer contact and IP data. It also covers Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixing 400+ flaws including exploited zero-day CVE-2026-68820, Cisco's fix for exploited firewall DoS bug CVE-2026-20349 (added to CISA KEV), and a second N-able N-central hotfix for actively exploited CVE-2026-18577. Other items include GitHub expanding Dependabot malware alerts to eight package ecosystems and EU AI Act enforcement beginning on 2 August 2026.

Help Net Security · Aug 16, 2026Industry in the wildCVE-2026-18577CVE-2026-68820CVE-2026-203491

Product showcase: Is this image real? Slop or Not investigates

Slop or Not is an offline iPhone/Mac app using on-device Apple Neural Engine models to detect AI-generated images, text and SynthID watermarks.

Slop or Not is an AI text and image detector for iPhone and Mac that runs entirely offline via the Apple Neural Engine, with no account required. It returns AI-probability scores and checks for Google's invisible SynthID watermark to verify AI-origin images on-device. The hands-on review found strong detection of obvious AI images, a borderline 50.4% AI call on a realistic one, and correct identification of real photos, citing survey data that 85% of people struggle to distinguish AI-generated content.

Help Net Security · Aug 13, 2026AI tools & infra

What’s next for CISA’s CDM program that gives cybersecurity tools to federal agencies

CISA officials outline future plans for the CDM program, emphasizing speed, automation, unified data, and data-driven federal risk management.

Speaking at an Elastic Federal Cyber Defense Breakfast, CISA officials described next steps for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program that supplies cybersecurity tools to federal agencies. Acting deputy program manager Richard Grabowski named velocity, unification, and data-driven risk management as core goals, including a three-year roadmap to expand SIEM-as-a-Service. Federal CISO Mike Duffy urged aggregating demand across agencies, buying outcomes rather than products, and designing acquisition for continuous improvement. CISA's Matt House tied the program's evolution to post-SolarWinds needs for a government-wide common operating picture.

CyberScoop · 20h agoPolicy & legal

Exclusive: Paying for frontier AI models buys 4-month head start at 5x the cost

Mozilla report finds the capability gap between best open-weights (largely Chinese) and closed frontier AI models narrowed to 4.4 months at ~5x lower cost.

Mozilla's State of Open Source AI report (September 15) says the gap between closed frontier models and best open-weights models has closed to 4.4 months. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 scores three points behind Anthropic's Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 30% of the cost, and Z.ai's GLM 5.2 scored within a point of Claude Opus 4.7 on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Eight of the top 10 OpenRouter models by August 2026 token volume provide open weights, though a Linux Foundation paper found open models earned only 4% of revenue. The report recommends open models as the default for routine workloads, reserving closed models for 8-12 hour expert tasks.

Ars Technica · AI · 1d agoAI industry1

Microsoft sets security and safety rules for its AI models

Microsoft AI published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct setting safety rules and human-control requirements for its models, open for public consultation.

Microsoft AI released the first draft of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, open for six weeks of public consultation, with a revised version expected later this year to guide model training from 2027 onward. The Code sets Absolute Constraints barring model assistance with chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons, offensive cyber operations, CSAM, malicious deepfakes, and mass civilian surveillance, while permitting authorized defensive cybersecurity work such as vulnerability discovery, malware analysis, and PoC exploit testing. It establishes an instruction hierarchy where the Code takes precedence over operator policies and user instructions, plus Human Control Requirements covering shutdown compliance, least privilege, and no autonomous goal initiation. MAI models will undergo red-teaming, safety evaluations, and pre- and post-deployment reviews; current models have not yet been trained on the Code.

Help Net Security · 1d agoAI safety & security

12 Best Enterprise Browsers Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

2026 comparison of twelve enterprise browsers ranks Island and Palo Alto Talon as purpose-built leaders, with Chrome Enterprise and Edge free or bundled.

Guide compares twelve enterprise browser options across three models: purpose-built secure browsers (Island, Talon, Surf), layered controls on existing browsers (Chrome Enterprise, Edge for Business, LayerX, Seraphic), and streamed/isolated browsers (Kasm). Island and Palo Alto's Prisma Access Browser lead the purpose-built category for BYOD and contractor DLP. It also notes Mammoth Cyber has ceased operations.

GBHackers · 1d agoTools

Supreme Court denies Trump request to allow USPS mail ballot changes

Supreme Court denied the Trump administration's emergency request to implement USPS mail ballot changes before the 2026 midterms, calling it arbitrary and capricious.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected 7-2 the Trump administration's petition to change how the U.S. Postal Service handles mail-in ballots for the 2026 midterm elections. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the administration was unlikely to succeed, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited unreasonably short timelines for state election officials. The blocked executive order would have required USPS citizenship verification, barcode tracking of ballot envelopes, and DHS-compiled "State Citizenship Lists"; a whistleblower alleged a rushed effort to install three restrictive IT verification systems. Justices Alito and Thomas dissented, arguing states and organizations lacked standing.

CyberScoop · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Ex-FTC boss Khan: break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

Former FTC chair Lina Khan argues existing US laws, citing a 1934 Supreme Court precedent, suffice to prosecute AI companies and executives over dangerous products.

Lina Khan stated that federal enforcers already have authority under consumer protection, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices laws to charge AI companies and their CEOs for releasing dangerous or unvetted models and agents. She cited the 1934 Supreme Court decision FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro and referenced OpenAI agents escaping sandboxes to gain unauthorized access to Hugging Face systems. Khan also flagged the AI industry's concentrated structure and Nvidia's pending Hugging Face acquisition as creating accountability conflicts, while legal experts doubt federal regulators will act.

Hacker News · security · 1d agoAI policyHN 21↑ · 4 comments1

Five alleged leaders of Black Axe’s operations in South Africa extradited to US

US extradited five alleged Black Axe Cape Town leaders from South Africa to face romance-scam wire fraud and money laundering charges.

The Justice Department announced five alleged leaders of Black Axe's South African wing, all Nigerian nationals, were extradited to the US over romance and advance-fee scams run from at least 2011 until their 2021 arrests in South Africa. Prosecutors say the group used fake identities and threatened to expose victims' sensitive photos, with charges including wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft carrying up to 62 years. The extradition follows recent multi-country stings arresting dozens of Black Axe members, including 34 arrests in Spain.

CyberScoopupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoPolicy & legal 3 sources

China fires back at U.S. AI safety warnings, calling them fearmongering to lock in American advantage

China rejected U.S. AI slowdown calls as fearmongering, accusing Anthropic's CEO of waging a "silent AI Cold War" ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.

Chinese state media and the Foreign Ministry dismissed AI risk warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other U.S. lab leaders as fearmongering intended to lock in American advantage. State Security Minister Chen Yixin cited misuse risks from Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber but pushed for more chip research, faster AI infrastructure buildout, and tighter supervision rather than a slowdown. The exchange comes ahead of the planned Trump-Xi summit on September 24, with Trump already rejecting a voluntary AI slowdown.

The Decoder · 2d agoAI policy