FBI PIN: Malicious Actors Almost Certainly Will Leverage Synthetic Content for Cyber and Foreign Influence Operations

The FBI has published a Private Industry Notification (PIN) advising that malicious actors will almost certainly leverage synthetic content for cyber and foreign operations in the next 12-18 months. The FBI reports that foreign actors are already using synthetic content in their influence campaigns and that they and criminal cyber actors will increasingly use this material for spear phishing and social engineering in an evolution of cyber operations tradecraft. Synthetic content refers to a broad spectrum of generated or manipulated digital content, including images, video, audio, and text. They are known popularly as deepfakes or GANs (generative adversarial networks). The PIN provides further background of this phenomena and provides information on how to identify and mitigate it. It also encourages partners to  report suspicious or criminal activity to their local FBI field office or the FBI’s 24/7 CyberWatch (CyWatch) at (855)292-3937 or Cy*****@*bi.gov.