How to Protect Your Company From Deepfakes
Assuming you are like every other company, you communicate with people. People like employees, customers, suppliers and the media.
Given what we are seeing, already, with deepfakes and the the fact that this is only just starting, what is your plan to protect your reputation?
Would a competitor or someone else publish a photo, video, memo or other digital content that looks like it came from you but had been altered to totally destroy your company’s reputation?
Nah. Who who do that?
A couple of places we are already seeing it is in politics – and except to see a lot more of that over the next several months and in fake pornography. Fake porn is used to damage reputations, embarrass people and distract from the facts. Both move with the speed of light. The deepfake porn of Taylor Swift which was posted on Twitter was viewed 43 million times in about one day before Twitter blocked searches to her. Granted, she is a bit of an exception, but her reputation will survive that.
Will your company’s reputation survive fake press releases or fake social media posts or whatever other digital bits someone who is mad at you might chose to throw at you or your company? Or at your family!
The White House has a plan but it is a bit nuclear in the sense that it requires effort to implement.
The other problem organizations have is that the recipient of the information needs to trust you. Perhaps a bit of information is “accidentally” not signed. It would be easy to blame a hacker and shift the narrative. We have already seen that in politics already. That video of me – that’s not me; that is a deepfake.
Their plan is to cryptographically digitally sign every artifact that comes out of the big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Does that sound like a lot of work? Certainly, given the number of bits generated by that house, that is a lot of work.
On the other hard, you are neither Taylor Swift nor the White House. You don’t have the resources to do damage control. If social media picks up something about you that it finds interesting, there is likely no turning it off. Unless you have the clout of the White House or Swift. Which I suspect that you do not.
But you better have a plan to deal with it.
The problem with cryptographically signing information is that you have to train people how to validate the authenticity of it. And ensure that the validation tools are not compromised.
SO. No easy answer here. But you can’t ignore the problem either.
But definitely something that should be on your radar.
Because deepfakes are NOT going away for a long time.
If you need help, please contact us.
Credit: Cybernews
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