Pod Insights a16z Podcast How to spot an AI Deepfake About this episode Brian Long (Adaptive Security) on Deepfakes and Emerging AI Threats
Brian Long, co-founder of Adaptive, joins a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the rapid evolution of AI-driven threats, from deepfakes to sophisticated misinformation campaigns. As AI-generated content becomes increasingly realistic, bad actors are finding new ways to exploit these tools for fraud, identity theft, and large-scale deception. Brian dives into the latest developments in adversarial AI, how organizations can stay ahead of evolving threats, and why security teams need to rethink traditional defense strategies. He also examines the arms race between hackers and AI-powered security tools—and what it will take to maintain trust in a world where seeing is no longer believing.
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https://www.adaptivesecurity.com/blog
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Brian Long - https://x.com/BrianCLong/
Joel de la Garza - https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/
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01:10 - How do you think about protecting people from DeepSeek security threats?
03:53 - Virtual Kidnapping and deepfakes
06:30 - What can companies do to ensure their employees are more resilient against attacks?
10:39 - How do you make the training meaningful to employees and drive the ROI?
13:17 - Threats are evolving, where do we go from here?
17:04 - Employment scams
20:09 - Agentic security systems
21:32 - Resources for informing your security awareness and protocol
Transcript 0:05 Speaker 0 There's still a bit of ego and hubris among the technology folks that we can secure this without securing the people, that we can just secure the systems. The reality is that almost 90% of attacks still come through people. And if you want to talk about securing things, like look, I do think there's been a lot of advancement in securing uh email uh as an attack factor. I think that the systems are getting a lot smarter and outsmarting some of the systems that protect us in email, and there's got to be vigilance there, but the other channels are where there's uh you know just tremendous exposure. So my advice to people at companies who are in charge of security and and care about this huge new attack factor would be to make sure that your employees are uh extremely well educated on where these attacks are going and and what to expect, and then B to test uh and understand your organization to see where you're particularly vulnerable to these types of attacks.
1:10 Speaker 1 The problem we've been talking about is the the deep seek model came out, set the world on fire. Um it seems like this is yet another kind of chat GPT moment where things are accelerating, they're going faster. It's now open source, people are adopting it. And so we've been talking about kind of how do you think about protecting the the the not just sort of the the infrastructure and not just the code, but also the people, right? Because obviously now that this model is open source, it's out there, people can run it themselves. It's gonna be used by adversaries, it's gonna be used by the bad people to do nefarious things, as all technology does. Um, and and sort of the sun also rises, right? So would love to maybe get your thoughts on sort of thinking through how you think about protecting people from these kinds of threats and like what are the possibilities that can happen and how do we defend our people against this sort of stuff.
2:01 Speaker 0 Well, I mean, first let's let's talk about the problem and where it's gonna go, I think over the next couple of years. So since ChatGPT came out a little over two years ago, we've seen over a four X increase in social engineering attacks. Um, but I I think beyond that, you know, we've seen an even larger increase in more sophisticated attacks uh using things like deepfakes, where in the United States in 2024, we saw over a hundred thousand deepfake attacks. Um, you know, when I was talking to CISOs a year ago, you might have found five to 10% of people experienced the deep fake uh now when you talk, I think it's probably more than 30, 40%. And I think that's gonna end up being the the you know, the the answer that everyone's gonna experience it in the next year or so.
2:50 Speaker 0 When you see models like Deep C come out, I think as you you allude to, you know, you bring the ability for attackers to use those models in a consumer device, and without the guardrails of some of the more, you know, established security-friendly players out there. So I think that the outcome of that is that anyone can do an attack now from their smartphone from any country in the world and do a pretty darn sophisticated attack. So, you know, I think first off, we're gonna see that increase tremendously. And I think what what attacks, you know, what we need to be thinking about is sure, I think email is definitely going to continue to be a big attack vector, but these new models allow other attack vectors to be other channels to be accessed at a price that you can do a large brute force attack and it still makes sense.
3:42 Speaker 0 So, you know, whether that's voice or SMS or video um or chat, um, all those can now be done at scale um where, you know, previously I think it would have been cost prohibitive.
3:54 Speaker 1 One of the things we've seen in the last year, and one of our general partners talked about this actually on Twitter where they were the subject of a virtual kidnapping. So their dad started their dad started messaging them, called and left voicemail messages, had the voice replicated, sounded exactly like him, demands to wire money somewhere, obviously. Luckily, this person called their father and was able to get him on the phone and he confirmed that he was fine.
4:21 Speaker 0 Yeah. Um,
4:21 Speaker 1 and then from there kind of triggered an investigation. But like that's that's actually a very scary thing to think about, right? Just not just the sort of virtual kidnappings aren't necessarily new. This has been something that's happening in in a lot of countries for a long time now. But having the ability to do that kind of a deep fake is new. And and I guess I guess the question would be like for folks for just normal folks, not security folks, kind of how should they think about preparing themselves for that kind of an eventuality? It does it does seem like this is somewhat inevitable.
4:50 Speaker 0 Well, the best practical tip that I can give normal folks to take today, right now, is to open up your phone, go to your voicemail, and delete the voicemail greeting that you may have made in your own voice. Um, because now with these models, that's all they need in order to do the replication of your voice. Um, you know, you don't uh need some long transcript of you uh on a podcast like this or someplace. Um, you know, you don't have to be a public person or any way. They can just get it through that very small voice sample on the greeting. So that would be the first thing. The second thing would be, and I know this is uh this so the first thing I think is very practical and everyone should do it. The second thing goes more on the paranoid side, which is if you're getting phone calls from you know parties that you don't know who they're calling you from.
5:40 Speaker 0 Um, I would also be careful about picking up and speaking a lot to that party. Um, if it's not within your voicemail greeting, they can copy your voice through again, just a couple seconds of you talking. Um, I think you can say hello, but you don't need to say who you are or you know, confirm that it's your voice or give them uh more seconds of audio that could be used otherwise. And that sounds like a crazy comment now, but uh I'm betting pretty strong that in five years, this will be a very normal thing people think about.
6:12 Speaker 1 I immediately thought that I need to go delete my voicemail and then remember we're recording a podcast. I'm kind of done. Um yeah, I mean, I think I think that's that's that's actually really quite scary as you start to think about it, and then we push into new modalities and start doing video, right? Like you get you get the ability to have something pretty destructive. I I guess maybe switching kind of from your your average consumer and talking more about the enterprise. Um obviously thieves want to go where there's money and and and money is in the companies, right? We've seen without any generative AI, we've seen scams where people will text employees and pretend to be the CEO and either get them to buy gift certificates or in the case of like you know, Facebook, wire a lot of money to a third party in another country. Um obviously it seems like generative AI makes this a lot more effective.
7:00 Speaker 1 I'm kind of I'm kind of curious your thoughts on sort of what companies can start to do to train their people to be a little bit more resilient to this sort of stuff.
7:09 Speaker 0 Yeah, look, I I think that companies uh are overexposed to this because you know, when it's an individual and it's your parent or something like that, um, or or a loved one, you know, you're gonna call them up, you're gonna say it does make sense, you're gonna push back. I I think the power of authority at a company is so overwhelming. And I've uh firsthand experienced this across many an intelligent and and thoughtful employee who, when pushed the right way, um act against it. The other thing is, you know, I think there is a concerning to me. Um there's still a bit of ego and hubris among the technology folks that we can secure this without securing the people, that we can just secure the systems. The reality is that almost 90% of attacks still come through people. And if you want to talk about securing things, like look, I do think there's been a lot of advancement in securing uh email uh as an attack factor.
8:02 Speaker 0 I think that the systems are getting a lot smarter and outsmarting some of the systems that protect us in email and there's got to be vigilance there, but the other channels are where there's uh you know just tremendous exposure. So my uh, you know, my advice to um people at companies who are in charge of security and and care about this huge new attack factor would be to make sure that your employees are A, uh extremely well educated on where these attacks are going and what to expect. Um, and then B to test uh and understand your organization to see where you're particularly vulnerable um to these types of attacks. On part A, you know, I when you when you talk to a lot of uh security teams today, I think that when they think about training of the broader organization, they think they're just checking the box and that training is just a compliance thing and uh they do it once a year, and most people just kind of rage click through next to get to the end.
8:57 Speaker 0 And they they think they kind of know it all. Um, but unfortunately, as the world is changing as fast as it is, I think that there's uh there's a lot of gaps. We need to make sure people are are really learning and paying attention to those things. And then, you know, number two is more of an ongoing exercise. I mean, not that education's ongoing too, but I think you can do it a couple of times and get people pretty ramped up on things, whereas understanding where your weaknesses are, where your vulnerabilities are is your business change by testing these new attack factors, simulating these attacks and ingesting data from third-party sources to understand, you know, where people are are again have some of this weakness, right? I mean, you need to understand among your team and and people who have authority, um, you know, where might their information be public, where might their information be vulnerable.
9:50 Speaker 1 So one of the one of the things that's always been incredible to me about the security industry. And and I I'd say it's probably the one of the one of the big dirty little secrets in the security industry that no one wants Talk about, or no one ever really highlights is that if you look at spend and efficacy. So if you actually look at I spend X dollars and I present why prevent Y breaches, training and awareness is by far the best ROI of the entire portfolio that a CISO has. Yet it's become this kind of rote sort of check the box. I've got, I actually have an email in my inbox about how I need to complete my training. And so if a professional like myself delays this, you can imagine what other folks do. The question would be like, how do you break through that?
10:35 Speaker 1 Like it with without without without making it the checkbox thing, how do you make this actually meaningful to employees and drive that ROI?
10:44 Speaker 0 Yeah, I mean, look, I think when you talk to employees as well as the people who manage these trainings, the feedback on a lot of the legacy solutions out there is that the trainings are really not built for the company uh and the person that they're trying to train, right? 90% of the content's not relevant. Um, often it's uh delivered in a pretty boring way. Uh it's hard to make things not boring. Um, and and then, you know, I think finally it's often outdated, right? These companies, because they're um, you know, they tend to make it and their legacy companies that made it five, 10 years ago, it's not updated for the most recent threats. And, you know, updating it, making it great, unfortunately, is maybe a cost center for these companies. So I think that the opportunity for AI here to make training amazing is huge.
11:32 Speaker 0 Um, and in particular in security, you know, we've invested a lot to make training on security matters. Um, well, obviously updated for most recent threats, also super personal. You know, we we at adaptive security utilize things like deep fakes within our actual training of the corporate executives and managers and people at the company. So they see what that experience is really like. Uh, we show how attackers use these new LLMs and other tools to put together attack. We surface for the individual employee what sort of open source intelligence might exist about them and their peers. And I am uh continually, I'm even very surprised by the amount of open source intelligence that exists about you and me and lots of people out there that I think most people don't fully grow today.
12:18 Speaker 1 Yeah, it's incredible what's what's available. I'm curious your take. I mean, I think that's all that's all super important. And I think that to your earlier sort of point that like 90% of attacks are targeting individuals, like a large percentage of that has just been spear phishing. I was an incident manager for a long time. I've run very large security organizations. Like it's always amazing the things that people click on. Like, and and we had an investigation years ago um when I was working at a bank where we actually got access to some of the chat logs that the scammers had talking to each other about formulating their messages. And and the really interesting thing was is that they they intentionally made typographical errors and they intentionally phrase things incorrectly to try to drive engagement.
13:04 Speaker 1 And I'm just, I'm just like, it just seems like a very high level of sophistication in terms of kind of social line engineering people. Um, and and just kind of maybe thinking about these threats are constantly evolving. And I guess I'd love to understand like where do you think we go from here? Like you've got very clever people on the other side, and we have to at least be as clever, if not more.
13:27 Speaker 0 Right. I mean, I think that the reality where things are going on the attack side is that that clever attacker that was doing that stuff, you know, there aren't there weren't that many of them. Now with AI, they can lever themselves up and they can make you know infinite numbers of themselves as agents to go out and do these types of attacks autonomously. And um, it's going to be very, very profitable for them. So they're gonna have lots of money to pile back in and run this like a business and scale it up among the best strategies and the best things they have, right? So I think you're gonna see a huge increase in that, you know, so many people are excited about being able to automate sales teams or automate other teams with agents, customer service teams, the same is true for this this hacking type team.
14:13 Speaker 0 It's the the same type of uh interaction that we're we're we're automating. You know, in terms of just I think overall on the uh security and training side, too, just to come back to that for one second. Um the training is kind of a joke at the company, I think it also sends a signal to all of the employees that the company's security posture is also not very important. And that um, you know, hey, yeah, these tests exist, but you know, you you don't really have to worry too much about it, just click the box a few times and get over it. And I think that that's to me concerning because you know, maybe uh they've gotten away with it when the tax were less sophisticated, but it's becoming more and more sophisticated. I think there's a huge just broad surface that's uh exposed on these things. I think over the next couple of years to kind of get back to your point on where these attackers are going, you know, what we're gonna see happen.
15:06 Speaker 0 Um what's already happening is that there are news articles kind of sneaking out that to me surprisingly don't get as much covers as they should, but that are coming on a regular cadence every couple days about some you know significant deep fake or AI-powered attack that incurred at something. Fortunately, while you know, there have been cases where tens of millions of dollars have been lost or a company was, you know, lost their business for a couple of days or whatever it is, it was mainly financial. I I think what I'm really worried about is that when you're going to see this actually transition to people being actively hurt, um, you know, hospitals being taken down, energy systems taken offline, other things like that. Um, obviously we've had cases of that already happen, but I think that happening in a really large scale way is probably what motivates me the most to stop that type of threat.
15:58 Speaker 0 Um, because of course we all, you know, feel terrible when someone, you know, has their business suspended for a while, loses a lot of money, uh, but we can get those things back to a degree, we can't get back, you know, life. So I think that's really what I'm most worried about. And I think it's unfortunately very likely to happen the next couple of years in a large scale, um, affecting all types of businesses. That the example that I I brought up in a recent post that I feel like was just kind of overlooked. Maybe maybe you covered it some point, I don't know, but overlooked in the broader media was when someone used to deepfake in order to call up the chairman of the foreign relations committee for the Senate and manage deep a Russian uh uh a Russian member of the government in order to try to get uh information from the US on what they were doing uh in the Ukraine.
16:47 Speaker 0 Uh and you know, thankfully, I it sounds like they didn't leak much information. We didn't get much, but I wonder how many of those things are happening behind the scenes we don't find out about. Like that just came through a week.
17:00 Speaker 1 I mean, a similar, an exactly similar threat to that. And it's it's one of the ones where you see that the the current way that we train our people is falling down is the employment scams. Like you've got you've got active groups of of foreign, probably foreign state sponsored hackers getting employment at Silicon Valley tech companies, showing up for day one and you know, walking away with all the secrets and then disappearing, right? Like it's it's it's it's concerning. It almost feels like you do the training and you know, probably for like a week, everyone's like locked down and super good. And then the efficacy sort of like
17:37 Speaker 0 it's
17:38 Speaker 1 it's it's sort of like seems like this point-in-time compliance-driven approach just isn't really serving us right.
17:43 Speaker 0 Well, look, I think there's two things. One, I think training should be personalized to you. Um, and it should really engage and hopefully j be jarring to you. If it's not jarring in some way, then it's not really working. So I think that's the first thing. Um, we've we've worked pretty hard to try to reinvent it, but I think we're so early in our invention and uh a lot more personalization is needed. So it speaks directly to you and what matters to you. Um number two is I do think people learn the best by experiencing uh that feeling when it actually happens. And, you know, we offer different levels of simulated AI-powered attacks. Um, some that are easier to spot, some that are more realistic and harder to spot and push further down into credential harvesting and things like that. Um, and I think that when an individual experiences that um they get a little more hardened about it.
18:33 Speaker 0 Now, of course, I don't want an individual worrying about every email they click or everything they do, and certainly there are um hopefully a lot of uh good technology that protects them from an email standpoint. But in a lot of other channels, they're not protected. Uh and an email, a lot of stuff is getting through. So I do think that there's uh kind of a uh a much larger and renewed uh vigilance is is needed here that gets passed. And I had to laugh at your your story that you just told about uh someone being able to get into one of these companies. Uh, one of the legacy training companies actually came out a few months ago and said that they actually had someone from North Korea that I think they may have employed or that got into their systems or something. And it just shows you that even companies that are thinking about these things
19:20 Speaker 1 um
19:20 Speaker 0 are not able to completely stop it. Um so you need to be able to have a smart response as well.
19:26 Speaker 1 Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I I don't I don't recall the specific details of that event, but I can tell you that other events that are very similar, yeah, involve, you know, three folks, probably North Korean doing remote job applications as developers for tech companies, getting onboarded, right? Um, passing background checks, having addresses where the laptop gets shipped. Obviously, it's a forwarding address. So the laptop goes somewhere abroad. They log in for their first day of work, they download the code repos, take the secrets, and then they're out, right? Like it's it's it's a big business. Um, it's in it's incredible. I guess. Do you think do you think we'll get to a point? Like it feels like we need to decompose the problem like longer term. Like obviously, this is a trend uh an evolution. Do you think we get to a point where we have like the clippy for security or some kind of like continuous reminder to be secure?
20:17 Speaker 0 Yeah, it's a good question. I think point to your point too about they get the, you know, they get access to the corporate computer and they download a bunch of the the code. I think what's scarier too is that with everyone being remote and how systems are, they could also put new things in the code or they could download the information on all the data from their customer bases and their access controls and all the sort of other other things that are out there that we often are happening behind the scenes. So I think you're right that that's uh definitely happening. In terms of like in an ongoing, you know, sort of coach that's advising you and stopping you from things. Yes, I I think on the one side where you've got agents that are acting to attack, you can also have agents that are working to protect. And like any arms race, you know, and I think we're operating on the side of good, trying to protect, and we're trying to max them and fight them and build those type of tools.
21:09 Speaker 0 So yes, I I do think that you're gonna see a lot of that AI being used for very good um to protect. And uh, you know, we're gonna be fighting each other over the next decade plus. And I'm I'm confident that we're gonna win over it. But unfortunately, I think that um, you know, we've got to wake up because uh as much as you know, some of the technical systems are okay. I don't think the human systems are up to the bar yet. There's a lot of information out there,
21:34 Speaker 1 not all of it is particularly good, as we've talked about. A lot of it is is can be misleading for reasons and different reasons and stuff. Where should we direct people? Obviously, we've got a blog in A16Z about the the 16 things you can do to protect yourself. We keep it updated. Are there some additional resources we could drive people to? Is there something that they should be reading? Because this is all very sort of cutting edge.
21:54 Speaker 0 Yeah, it is cutting edge and happening real time. And certainly I think I I get most of my news following lots of great people on X. Um, I'm trying to post more myself. I'm trying to get away from the the side of just being paranoid and actually posting things. So I'm just uh at Pri and C long. Um we also have a a blog on our corporate website or companies just adaptive security.com and then just uh navigate over to the blog and there's there's posts there, and we'll continue posting a lot of stuff uh in this area. But you'll see some of them are more recent uh attacks and information posted there.
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