Security News > 2020 > August > Black Hat 2020: Open-Source AI to Spur Wave of ‘Synthetic Media’ Attacks

At a Wednesday session at Black Hat USA 2020, researchers with FireEye demonstrated how freely-available, open-source tools - which offer pre-trained natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition tools - can be used to create malicious the synthetic media.

Social media companies often do not require high bars of credibility, and offer a platform for content to go viral, allowing anyone to create fake media that is believable.

While these open-source models have many advantages - including for research and detection against malicious AI bots - they are also leading to real-world, malicious, fake content found on social media platforms.

Researchers demonstrated various open-source models that are providing both good and bad actors with the means to create synthetic media content.

Researchers said, a bad actor could put an "Input" of open source social media posts from the Russian Internet Research Agency, which they describe as a social media "Troll factory." This input would then create fine-tuned text generations as an output, which can then be posted by troll accounts as part of disinformation campaigns online - such as "It's disgraceful that our military has to be in Iraq and Syria."

News URL

https://threatpost.com/black-hat-2020-open-source-ai-to-spur-wave-of-synthetic-media-attacks/158066/