Deepfakes are a critical concern in cybersecurity because they exploit advanced artificial intelligence technology to create highly realistic fake media, often with malicious intent.

Since deepfakes represent an evolving cybersecurity challenge, they require high-level awareness and a combination of technological and societal responses to address effectively, according to Myke Lyons (pictured), chief information security officer of Cribl Inc.

“We’re showing them to our employees, our population base[and] our constituents, whoever they are, and teaching them what to be on the lookout for,” Lyons said. “These deepfakes, while some of them are absolutely hilarious, a lot of them aren’t hilarious, and they’re really traumatizing for some people to listen to. People that are not digital natives will continue to struggle there.”

Lyons spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante at the NYSE CXO series, and the interview was rerun at the recent Cyber Resiliency Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed some of the new burning issues in cybersecurity, such as deepfakes, laptop farms and how gen AI can enhance this field.

The connection between deepfakes and laptop farms

Laptop farms are emerging as a significant threat to cybersecurity because of their role in facilitating various harmful activities, such as content manipulation and deepfakes. As a result, addressing them requires robust cybersecurity measures and cooperation between organizations, according to Lyons. 

“These are locations where companies who are seemingly hiring someone who they think is going to do a job; typically, it’s a tech job, it’s a lower skill job,” he said. “They’ll actually intentionally have the person be an underperformer, and then they will fake, at the very last minute, change the address. These are networks of folks that are generating, whether it’s knowledge of your company or they’re generating money by manipulating that machine in some way or trying to ransom their way out.”

Gen AI is making significant contributions to solving cybersecurity challenges by offering innovative tools and techniques needed for threat detection and prediction. As a result, when gen AI is combined with human expertise, it creates a robust defense mechanism against evolving cyber threats, according to Lyons. 

“We’re working with gen AI capabilities to reduce some of the challenges,” he said. “Maybe it’s an intern turned over, and she’s just got there. Isn’t it a great opportunity for us to leverage gen AI to generate the syntax on her behalf, and she can just enter in the question she wants to interrogate the data with. This is just allowing people to interact with systems as though [she’s] here as your peer, and we just sit side by side and just try to stop the bad guys together. I think that’s a really big advent for us.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Cyber Resiliency Summit: 

Photo: SiliconANGLE