this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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This feature is extremely insecure now that there's several AIs that can replicate voices. If a scammer calls you and you say a few words (like if you say "hello" and "sorry, I think you've got the wrong number"), a recording of that can be enough for them to replicate your voice.
This happened at my workplace. An attacker got into someone's Schwab account by calling Schwab support and successfully getting past the voice verification, and attempted to transfer $100k (from a recent stock sale) out of their account. It took a bit of effort but they managed to get all the money back.
Schwab sent out a bulk email to everyone at my company saying they're improving their security as a result, but I'm not sure if they've actually improved it. They're still promoting this insecure feature.
Yup, I almost didn't enable it, but since I was on vacation and didn't want to go set up the app (I try to never set up security features when away from my desk), I let them set it up. They claimed it was AI-resistant, but I honestly don't believe them.
But I don't think enabling it alone would increase risk of anything, it just adds another barrier to impersonating me over a phone. I think they said it wouldn't bypass any other checks, it just increases the likelihood that the call will be dropped before getting to those other checks. But I'm not sure how it works in practice.
Note to self: scream uncontrollably when picking up the phone
It honestly wasn't really that secure to begin with, since the audio would have the daylights crushed out of it through the phone system. Though AI probably makes it easier by just letting you have a computer at the end of it spit out some words.
Someone could probably get away with it by sounding vaguely enough like the person calling.
Or just do the tried and true method of going through the in-person support. Voice recognition, at least in my experience, over the phone, has trouble with accents, so someone calling to get around that isn't uncommon. It never works with me, for example, it just goes "please try again" until it redirects me to an agent.