State-backed cyberattacks, AI deepfakes, and more: Experts reveal UK election cyber threats
Summary
In 2016, the U.S. presidential election and U.K. Brexit vote were both found to have been disrupted by disinformation shared on social media platforms, allegedly by Russian state-affiliated groups, although Moscow denies these claims. "Nation-state actors and cybercriminals are likely to utilize AI-powered identity-based attacks like phishing, social engineering, ransomware, and supply chain compromises to target politicians, campaign staff, and election-related institutions," Oktas McKinnon added. "Were also sure to see an influx of AI and bot-driven content generated by threat actors to push out misinformation at an even greater scale than weve seen in previous election cycles." China, Russia and Iran are highly likely to conduct misinformation and disinformation operations against various global elections with the help of tools like generative AI, according to Crowdstrikes latest annual threat report. Hackers are also developing more advanced — and personal — attacks by training AI models on our own data available on social media, according to Dan Holmes, a fraud prevention specialist at regulatory technology firm Feedzai.