A classic gift card scam has been getting an AI-powered audio remix.
In April 2024, a phisher replicated the voice of LastPass CEO Karim Toubba. The identity management firm detailed in a blog post the experience of an employee who received calls, texts, and a WhatsApp audio deepfake voicemail from the impersonated executive.
Toubba and Alex Cox, LastPass’s director of threat intelligence, shared how the company is trying to put the new threat on mute, one year on.
“These technologies pop up and you go, ‘Oh, man, I didn’t even think about that,’” Cox told IT Brew. “This is just one more episode in that arms race that we deal with in the security industry.”
What did I miss? The fake Toubba told the targeted employee via voice note something to the effect of “I need help urgently,” Toubba said of the April 2024 incident; the phisher then followed up via text
The adversary went for someone on the sales team—a commonly pestered group, according to Cox, given their easily available contact information. The sales pro, sensing phishiness, reported the incident to the security team.
Toubba sees the tactic as an extension of a common cyber threat: a fake email or text from a CEO asking for gift cards. “I think this is just a new channel,” he said.
Attack of the voice clones. On May 15, the FBI notified the public of fraudulent text and AI-generated voice messages. The effort, the agency wrote, aimed “to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts,” sometimes by sending targets a malicious link under the guise of moving to a new messaging platform.
According to CrowdStrike’s 2025 threat report, voice phishing attacks increased 442% between H1 and H2 2024. While spotting only two “vishing” intrusions in January and five intrusions in February, the cybersecurity company detected 93 attempts in December.
Available voice-cloning tools require a portion of preexisting audio—say, a podcast segment or a YouTube presentation. Cox believes the voice-clone’s training data could have come from a public-facing speaking engagement—a common enough occurrence for a CEO.
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Not that the LastPass duo were impressed with the replica, which Toubba said sounded “faintly” like him upon review.
“I could tell it wasn’t me,” Toubba told us, adding that sales pro could tell, too. (LastPass declined to allow the targeted employee to speak with us, citing internal policies.)
“A lot of the deepfake tools don’t require a whole lot of background data,” Cox said, noting that his team quickly notified all employees of the active campaign in the company’s security channel. “They require a little bit of basic audio, and then they can kind of roll with it. That’s one of the specters of this new AI world we’re in.”
Toubba said the company has two important measures to defend against the threat, including a clear policy defining official communication channels—and authentication controls to protect those channels.
“From a technology perspective, there is literally nothing you can do. It really comes down to training,” Lance Spitzner, a director at SANS Institute, said. “We need to train people: ‘Hey, cyberattackers are no longer going to try to fool you with email phishing attacks. They’re going to try the same scams, but on your phone.’”
While Toubba reflected on how deepfakes may someday move to video, Cox wondered when agents might join the line.
“What if I, as a bad guy, have this agentic AI and I say, ‘Watch Karim, and every time he speaks at a conference, do an audio deepfake and send it to every public-facing LastPass employee asking for gift cards,’” he said. An adversary “wouldn’t even have to monitor that,” he told us.
LastPass pros will have to be the ones doing the monitoring.