What happened
Wiz chief executive Assaf Rappaport said at TechCrunch Disrupt on 28 October 2024 that roughly two weeks earlier dozens of Wiz employees had received deepfaked voice messages impersonating him, in an attempt to harvest their credentials. Employees noticed that the voice matched his stage delivery at a conference rather than how he normally speaks, and the attempt failed. Wiz traced the source audio but did not identify the attackers.
How the deception worked
The attackers scaled a single cloned sample across dozens of recipients, betting that at least one employee would act on what sounded like a direct request from the chief executive. Voice messages rather than live calls removed the risk of interactive questions and let the same recording be reused, while the boss's authority supplied the pressure to comply quickly with a credential request. The flaw was in the source material: the only clean public audio was a conference keynote, so the clone inherited a projected, presentational tone that colleagues who hear Rappaport daily immediately found off. Employees compared notes and reported the messages rather than responding.
AI involvement · Confirmed AI-enabled
Attackers built a voice clone of chief executive Assaf Rappaport from audio of a conference talk and sent synthetic voice messages to dozens of employees seeking their credentials.
The control that would have caught it· our reading, not a claim from the sources
Credential requests should never be actionable from a voice message, and mass-distribution patterns across many employees should trigger automated correlation and alerting.
Sources (2)
- Wiz CEO says company was targeted with deepfake attack that used his voiceTechCrunch·techcrunch.comOpen ↗
- Hackers Sent a Deepfake of Wiz CEO to Dozens of EmployeesEntrepreneur·entrepreneur.comOpen ↗
This entry summarises public reporting. It is not a legal finding, and details can change as investigations conclude. Found an error? Send a correction.