Reality Defender integrates deepfake detection into ZeroFox platform

Deepfakes are among four critical threats requiring urgent action from cybersecurity leaders, according to a new report from Gartner. In a release, VP Analyst John Watts says “attacker use of deepfakes continues to advance and is now commonplace to make fraud and phishing scams difficult to detect.”

While Watts insists “there is no one cybersecurity control that will protect you,” citing presentation and injection attack detection as complex threats facing biometric authentication, New York’s Reality Defender might beg to differ. The enterprise deepfake detection company has announced a partnership with U.S. cybersecurity firm ZeroFox, and continues to develop strong relationships across the tech spectrum, including a long-standing partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

ZeroFox enlists Reality Defender to find deepfakes before they circulate

A release says the partnership with ZeroFox integrates AI-generated media detection into the ZeroFox Discover, Validate, Disrupt workflow, to address a converging threat: advanced generative AI deepfake tech combined with social engineering.

“The same actors building impersonation campaigns are increasingly using AI-generated voice, video, and images to make their social engineering more convincing,” says the release. “External threat platforms have historically been able to discover and disrupt campaign infrastructure, but have been unable to verify whether the media was AI-generated.”

The Reality Defender integration adds that verdict natively into the ZeroFox platform. Reality Defender’s RealAPI returns multimodal detection verdicts on voice, video, and image for ZeroFox analysts to review, escalate, document, and disrupt confirmed synthetic media campaigns as needed.

David Muse, CEO at ZeroFox, summarizes the threat: “from executives being impersonated on earnings calls to brands being undermined by AI-generated campaigns, threat actors are manufacturing digital realities to manipulate markets and destroy reputations.” According to Muse, the partnership with Reality Defender brings best-in-class synthetic media detection into the loop, radically cutting down response time and attendant damage.

“Most security teams catch the synthetic video after it is circulated,” says Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender. “The security teams working with ZeroFox catch it before the takedown.”

Welcome to Unreality: human mindset is running behind deepfake tech

In a profile on the AWS Startups blog, Reality Defender CTO Alex Lisle describes living in a “post-reality world.”

“All of a sudden something that you took for granted, that seeing and hearing was believing, suddenly wasn’t. And that happened remarkably quickly.”

The idea that you can’t believe anything you see online was already ingrained in our culture, and generative AI has amplified the problem. Every piece of online video now comes with a measure of doubt. In this kind of environment, distrust becomes endemic, and cognitive dissonance is a constant. Because, as Lisle says, “we still believe what we believe.”

“In a short space of time, the technology enabling deepfakes has evolved significantly, but the mindset and fundamental beliefs of those consuming content has not.”

AWS relationship remains critical

Reality Defender has a long partnership with AWS, having participated in the AWS Generative AI Accelerator and AWS Activate programs. The firm, which is a recognized leader in the deepfake detection space, is planning for an eventual a listing on AWS Marketplace to support its go-to-market strategy.

Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender, tells AWS, “we started the company as a non-profit research project ahead of the 2020 election. We went to market with a tool, with the idea of it being able to detect deepfakes from the election. What we realized very quickly was that there were no deepfakes in the 2020 election. We were very ahead of the market, by three or four years.”

While deepfake penetration took its time catching up to the company, it used the time to refine its solution, which detects deepfakes across real-time video, voice, and images, securing critical communications channels without collecting biometric data. And it found a solution to the problem of scalability.

“Building a platform to detect deepfake threats in real time across all media requires massive, infinite scalability,” says Coleman in a post on LinkedIn. “That is exactly why we partnered with AWS from our earliest days. Their infrastructure allowed us to auto-scale to the point where we recently detected a voice-based DDoS attack for a Fortune 10 client in real time.”

Article Topics

AI fraud  |  Amazon Web Services (AWS)  |  deepfake detection  |  deepfakes  |  generative AI  |  Reality Defender