Social Engineering Disrupted! How Deepfakes are Changing the Threat Weapons of Mass Disruption

Social engineering is a behavior as old as humankind, though the terminology is traced back to Dutch industrialist J.C. VanMarken in 1894. Van Marken believed that the world needed people who could handle social (human) problems, in much the same way that engineers handled mechanical problems. Today social engineering is understood to be behaviors and methods used by hackers and other bad actors to gain the trust of targeted individuals in order to access money, property, or information, often involving impersonation of those who are known to us. Just as people are finally beginning to understand the threat of phishing emails, generative AI is changing the social engineering game with the rise of Deepfake technology. On thisepisode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz is joined by Dr. Matthew Canham, a former Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI and co-founder of Psyber Labs, a technology start-up specializing in deepfake analysis and the psychological information operation strategies being employed by attackers. You can find them at https://deepfakedashboard.com/