Sophistication of AI-backed operation targeting senator points to future of deepfake schemes

Washington — An advanced deepfake operation targeted Sen. Ben Cardin, the Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, this month, according to the Office of Senate Security, the latest sign that nefarious actors are turning to artificial intelligence in efforts to dupe top political figures in the United States. “The Senator and their staff ended the call, and quickly reached out to the Department of State who verified it was not Kuleba.” Cardin on Wednesday described the encounter as “a malign actor engaged in a deceptive attempt to have a conversation with me by posing as a known individual.” “After immediately becoming clear that the individual I was engaging with was not who they claimed to be, I ended the call and my office took swift action, alerting the relevant authorities,” Cardin said. “In the past few months, the technology to be able to pipe in a live video deepfake along with a live audio deepfake has been easier and easier to integrate together,” said Rachel Tobac, a cyber security expert and the CEO of SocialProof Security, who added that earlier iterations of this technology had obvious tells that they were fake, from awkward lip movement to people blinking in reverse. These could come from the political angle, but it could also come from the financial angle like fraud or identify theft.” The memo to Senate staff echoed this sentiment, telling the staffers to make sure meeting requests are authentic and cautioning that “other attempts will be made in the coming weeks.” R. David Edelman, an expert on artificial intelligence and national security who led cyber security policy for years in the White House, described the scheme as a “sophisticated intelligence operation” that “feels quite close to the cutting edge” in how it combined the use of artificial intelligence technology with more traditional intelligence operations that recognized the connections between Cardin and the Ukrainian official.