Your banking apps can be fooled by these deepfake AI-generated videos – and you might not know they're on your iPhone

(Image credit: Tom's Guide / John Velasco)

If you've ever thought about jailbreaking your iPhone, here’s a reason that will definitely make you want to reconsider doing so: a new deepfake tool for iOS has been discovered that can inject videos into your device in order to fool your banking apps and commit identity theft.

As reported by Cybernews, security researchers at the biometric authentication company iProov have found a new tool that cybercriminals are using on jailbroken iPhones to do exactly this.

The tool works on jailbroken devices running iOS 15 or newer, and can use an RPTM, essentially a special server, to link a hackers computer to an iPhone in order to take over the link between a device’s camera and an app. It does so in order to keep an app from seeing the real camera feed so that it can instead feed it a stream of AI-generated deepfake video.

Meanwhile, the camera remains normal looking to the user – when they point it at any object, it still shows that back at them through the camera app. However, the app on the other end may see a fake face. This could potentially allow criminals to trick some apps into thinking that they’re dealing with the real person in real time, which in turn means they could commit fraud through banking apps that use biometric authentication by pretending to be a real person. Likewise, the tool can be used to create a fake identities.

iProov's researchers believe the tool is coming from China according to their report on the matter and think that the companies creating banking and financial apps will eventually need to upgrade to stronger systems that will be able to test for “liveness” by checking to see if the person on screen is real and actually present.

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Amber Bouman is the senior security editor at Tom's Guide where she writes about antivirus software, home security, identity theft and more. She has long had an interest in personal security, both online and off, and also has an appreciation for martial arts and edged weapons. With over two decades of experience working in tech journalism, Amber has written for a number of publications including PC World, Maximum PC, Tech Hive, and Engadget covering everything from smartphones to smart breast pumps.

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