The Great AI Money Heist of Europe
January 28 2027
The romantic image of a thief is a well-educated gentleman who eases in through a window, silently cracks the safe to get to a specific piece of jewellery, or takes only a valuable painting or two before vanishing back into the dark night. The “gentlemen” were replaced by hard-core criminals who don’t shy away from violence or wanton destruction to get what they want.
But with the rise of the internet, the thugs went online, performing elaborate scams to steal passwords, hack into secure systems and empty bank accounts or lock corporates out of their critical systems.
As the criminals got smarter, the access systems became more advanced, requiring longer and more complicated passwords and two-factor authentication, eventually combined with biometric access keys. And there it all failed, spectacularly, as many European banking clients realised yesterday when they got locked out of their accounts.
Deep-fakes, cloned voices and scrubbed fingerprints — generative AI has given the criminal networks a whole new toolbox. The thugs have been replaced by nerdy computer whizz kids weaving digital nets using AI tools and the dark web. Why bother with tedious cracking of passwords when your AI can scrape the net for a facial image from last year’s birthday and a voice snippet from a holiday clip, and combine them into a video message that would fool even your parents?
Yesterday afternoon, a wave of deepfake video calls convinced bankers across Europe to transfer hundreds of millions of euro from customers’ accounts to a spiderweb of anonymous entities and crypto wallets.
“Secure access and indisputable proof that you are the account owner are at the core of all banking systems,” said Torben Schtaad, adviser to the European Central Bank. “Without that, the online banking system collapses. And that’s where we are now!” On the question of what to do now, Schtaad threw up his hands and walked away.
Maybe the new DNA security locks will solve the problem, but then again ... can you be sure that your digital DNA from various blood tests or genetic screening isn’t lurking somewhere online? /First published on Mindbullets January 25 2024
TEN-MILLION FINGERPRINTS HACKED May 31 2016
Mary Master’s Minor Miracle was immensely popular for Virtue Studios, the New Yorkbased software studio. Their puzzle game achieved 10.1-million paid downloads in its first week available in the Apple App Store.
This morning, those customers will be cursing Virtue Studios.
Last night, their servers were hacked and their customers’ personal data compromised. Ordinarily, this wouldn’ t be so bad, but Virtue is using Apple’s new Fingerprint Password Service for permitting micropayments during the game. In contravention of Apple’s terms of service policy, Virtue was storing those fingerprint hashes on its own servers.
Instead of — no matter how inconvenient — simply changing their passwords, users now have the concern that their fingerprints are out in the wild.
The impact of the disaster is difficult to quantify. Most mobile phones require biometric verification of one form or another, and Apple’s is the leading format. Apple has yet to respond.
As Bruce Schneier, a security expert, says: “Biometric identity is a useful login, but it should never be a password. How do you change your fingerprints, iris, or other personal characteristic once they are compromised? And, as the Virtue situation proves, no matter how careful, that security will be compromised.”
Biometric security systems were to have rid us of the tyranny of remembering passwords, but now it appears they are even worse. /First published on Mindbullets January 30 2014