Deepfake Impersonation Attacks (Part 1): Anatomy of Modern Deepfakes

In 2024, Arup, a global engineering consultancy, fell victim to one of the most sophisticated deepfake fraud attacks, losing $25 million after an employee joined what appeared to be a legitimate video conference with AI-generated deepfake executives. This post explores the technical evolution of deepfake technology, from early GANs to modern diffusion models, and explains how attackers can now bypass enterprise liveness detection to impersonate executives in real-time video calls.