Microsoft Teams Is Getting Deepfake Detection, and the Trick You Can Use Right Now
People are impersonating CEOs and other important people inside Microsoft Teams meetings. Not just with text or chat messages. With audio and video. You can be looking at somebody who looks like the boss, talks like the boss, sounds like the boss, and it is not the boss. It is a criminal.
That is the problem Microsoft is trying to address, and the way they are doing it is actually pretty smart.
What Microsoft Is Actually Building
Microsoft is not building their own deepfake detection tool. What they are doing is opening up a portal inside Teams so that third-party deepfake detection software can plug in and do its job. Think of it as a gateway. The tools come in, provide you the service, and you pay the tool vendor, not Microsoft.
Honestly, I think that is the right call. Microsoft has too much going on to keep up with how fast this technology moves. The third-party tools are going to be better at this than anything Microsoft could build and maintain on their own.
The one thing I will be watching is how many third-party tools flood that marketplace. It is going to be very easy for developers to spin these up, and you could end up with a lot of noise before the good ones rise to the top.
Who Actually Needs to Pay Attention to This
If your business uses Teams for vendor negotiations, contract conversations, or any situation where someone might be asked to approve a payment, this matters to you. That is exactly the scenario these criminals are targeting. They get on a call, they look and sound like someone you trust, and they ask you to move money.
The technology that generates these fake video feeds is not perfect yet, and that is where a useful trick comes in. The AI systems that create these fake faces struggle when a hand moves in front of the face. If something feels slightly off on a video call, ask the person to put their hand in front of their face and touch their nose. If the video feed goes wonky, if the face distorts or breaks, you are probably not talking to who you think you are talking to.
It sounds almost too simple, but it works right now because the video generation AI cannot handle that kind of occlusion cleanly.
What to Do While You Wait for the Tools
Use that hand-in-front-of-the-face test any time something feels off. Trust that instinct. If a call feels slightly weird, it might be.
Beyond that, do not approve payments or make major decisions over a Teams call without a secondary confirmation through a completely different channel. A quick text or a phone call to a number you already have on file goes a long way.
I will be keeping a close eye on which third-party tools come through that Teams portal as they become available. If you want to know what is worth using when the time comes, reach out and I will point you in the right direction.
Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.
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