Podcast
Root Causes 262: The Continuing Erosion of Online Identity


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
December 14, 2022
In one of our 2022 wrap up episodes, we look back at the continued erosion of the idea of reliable online identity throughout the year. We discuss the rise of deep fakes, celebrity phishing, voice biometrics, AI-generated art, trust models, and the failure of Twitter blue check marks.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
So, if you go back in time to let’s say the early days of social media or even before then, the early days of the worldwide web, I think there existed a great deal of trust that a certain online individual or entity or organization or company talking about itself or speaking with the voice of that identity or company really was real, was authentic. Now, obviously, there were some challenges to that like phishing being a big one. Where someone pretends to be somebody they’re not to steal your money. But there was a pretty high degree of trust and reliance in people’s identities online. If I saw somebody with my friend’s name and my friend’s picture on a social media site, I didn’t really say “is that actually my friend?” And, while there’s been sort of an ongoing, this isn’t new in 2022 but I think in 2022 we saw a sudden uptick in the degree to which these particular ideas were being called into question. Do you agree?
But we saw this escalating in the last year, and I think there were a few things that were driving it that were kind of systematic. One of which was just the real progression of deep fake technology. The fact that it’s very easy now that really anybody can make a video or an audio file that seems to be somebody else talking and that right there has cast a lot of doubt and I’ve brought this idea up on a few occasions but, very famously in the 2022 election, there was this video that reportedly was Joe Biden falling asleep at the G20 or G12 or one of these and it just wasn’t real. Just plain wasn’t real. And so, that I think brought into the news something that existed and had existed, which is that it is well within the ability of lots of people, and this isn’t just highly trained professionals, but this is more or less anybody who is reasonably competent with a computer to create these things. And so, as a result, it’s cast a lot of doubt on one of the fundamental things that we thought we could rely on, which is this person’s picture, this person’s voice and now suddenly, those aren’t reliable.
So, the point being, this software to do it, is to the point where it is now in popular culture; it’s available to everyone; and that’s what’s gonna make this difficult, Tim, as you said, to really distinguish who is who in terms of identity anymore.
Another one what we’ve seen and this one actually me myself in a small way. I’m not a celebrity, but celebrity-based phishing or other kind of cons. Scams. Social engineering attacks that appropriate the identity of somebody that you believe that you know who they are and that you have some degree of trust for.
So, we know that it was a big year for phishing attacks and a lot of these were based on trying to steal your crypto wallet that were purporting to include celebrity endorsements for services that didn’t really exist that those particular celebrities didn’t endorse because they didn’t really exist. And so, this whole idea of taking the identity of somebody that you believe is real and attaching that to your skeevy activity in order to get passed the defenses and the barriers we have in our minds took off in 2022 in a pretty big way.

