As promised, I’m back this week to recap some of the top stories coming out of Black Hat and DEF CON.
Also as promised, AI was the talk of Vegas during Hacker Summer Camp (or at least from what I’ve been reading and hearing, I wasn’t there in person).
Several exhibitions and talks at both conferences showed how easy it is to create deepfake videos and potentially use them to spread fake news and disinformation. Two security researchers worked to deepfake themselves and even managed to trick people into believing it really was them on one end of a video conference call.
Others on the show floor had the opportunity to try their hand at creating deepfakes with the help of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One standout example was a fake video of former Royal Family member Meghan Markle being transposed onto the face of a reporter who could then speak in an approximation of Markle’s voice to say whatever she wanted to.
The good news is that, for now, these types of deepfakes are also incredibly easy for tools and humans alike to detect.
For example, Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative is working to place labels on images to indicate that they were originally human-made, and clicking on the image would allow the user to read more information about that image’s history and where and how it had been created.
And in the case of the Meghan Markle deepfak ..
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