How to spot fake news #5

Welcome everybody to the Security Guy and the CIA Spy Show podcast, where we are keeping you on top of what is new and ahead of what is next at all times on all things security, tech, and digital literacy. Knowing that when good people like you want to make sure that their money, their family, and their business is safe and secure from attackers, hackers, and thieves, or you just want to make sure your tech is running smoothly— my name is Robert Siciliano, I am the Security Guy, and along with my co-host Peter Wormka, who is a real and retired United States CIA spy, We will give you every single tool, tip, tactic, and skill that you need to fight the bad guy and keep your physical and digital life secure, worry less, and even make you happier. This podcast will help you breathe easier with less stress and a greater sense of well-being.

So let's get at it. And welcome to the Security Guy and the CIA Spy Podcast. I am Robert Siciliano, and this is Peter Wormka. Hey, Peter, how you doing today?

I'm doing fantastic. How about you, Robert?

How are things in Boston? Boston is, um, it's, uh, uh, balmy and sunny for the first time in a while. Uh, it has been an interesting time of the year with lots and lots of rain, but hey, you know, it's all good. Uh, world is as crazy as it's ever been, and I'm keeping my head above water, keeping the kids entertained, and, uh, you know, just have a— but I do have a general concern Well, so I've been reading up a lot about, uh, deepfakes.

Oh yeah, that's a hot topic right now.

Yeah, it, uh, and, and it's going to continue to be a hotter topic due to the fact that, um, it's not just for fun and for play. Uh, it's one of these, uh, issues that is beginning to infiltrate government agencies and corporate America in such a way where It's being used for fraud and scams, and consumers are none the wiser. You know, everyday people are being hooked by TikTok videos from celebrities or politicians that really aren't real, and they don't know that that's the case. And those consumers ultimately are employees, and so they can easily be phished and scammed in a number of different ways. So, um, I thought we'd talk about that today. What do you think?

Well, it's really interesting because it's just really It hasn't been around very long. I think it was started— incidentally, I think the— if you want to call it the creator or inventor of this, the individual that first launched it, it was on Reddit back in 2017. And I think his name that he used was Deepfake. So that's how it got the name. But 2017 is only a few years ago. And it's incredible of how it is evolving. Because some of the very first ones were— yeah, they were obvious deepfakes, right? The visual wasn't so good, or maybe the audio, you could definitely detect it. But now they have come so far, and it's just the beginning. They're gonna get much better. It'd be great, you have some examples?

Yeah, so first, Forbes magazine comes out, deepfakes are going to wreak havoc on society and we are not prepared. I totally agree with that. It goes on to say that, Hold on, let me get my eyeballs on here. Uh, it says that, um, deepfake technology enables anyone with a computer and an internet connection to create realistic-looking photos and videos of people saying and doing things that they did not actually say or do. You know, um, what do they say, like, a, um, a picture is a thousand words, but, you know, video is like a million words. Well, deepfakes are those million words, and they essentially can and are putting words in people's mouths. Uh, the, uh, very recently, uh, there was some TikTok videos of Tom Cruise, and the Today Show, uh, did a pretty good job of putting that together.

So it's crazy, it's entertaining, and it quickly becomes alarming. Is it Tom Cruise? Is it not Tom Cruise? This week it seemed like the actor joined TikTok.

That's what we thought.

But it all turned out to be a series of elaborate deepfake videos where special effects take a person's likeness and apply it to somebody else. The Cruise ones from this week are being called some of the best and most unsettling examples of deepfakes yet.

I'm going to show you some magic.

The real thing. I mean, uh, it's all The real—

hey, listen up, sports and TikTok fans.

If you like what you're seeing, just wait till what's coming next. Wait, right?

What are you talking about?

These Tom Cruise TikToks, they reviewed 11 million times before being made private. Fortune.com seems to have discovered the guy behind them.

Visual effects artist Chris Yum has done some of these impressive deep I don't care what anyone says, that is Tom Cruise. I know Tom Cruise.

It really, really looks like him, doesn't it?

Well, I mean, how is it not Tom Cruise? You know, that is Tom Cruise. Uh, and I, and I think it actually, I think it actually is Tom Cruise, but it's not actually Tom Cruise performing. Meaning that my understanding of what deepfakes are is that it's a combination of photos and videos that are act— of actual real people. And they take little bits and pieces of those photos and videos and they work them together with artificial intelligence technology in such a way where they are taking all existing real photos and videos and splicing them all together and actually recreating the actual person. And so you actually have real footage of a real person saying and doing real things, but it's being manipulated in such a way where, uh, it's not actually them saying it, uh, in real life, right?

Yeah, it's predominantly taking pictures— the, the pictures of the individual you want to, uh, portray, like Tom Cruise. That— the number of pictures that have been taken of him in different— and with celebrities It's very easy, right? Because you can have a large portfolio of pictures that you can use and put into the system. And then whatever you want to make them do or say is basically— it is the other person that's actually acting that out and saying those things and their body movements. And then you're right, this all comes together in these, uh, and there's a, there's a number of different, uh, programs that are already available to the public that you can— if you were to do a search on Google regarding deepfake software, there are ones that you can use for free, other ones that you can pay a fee to use, and they are incredibly, incredibly good. Now, some of the real basic ones you can tell. If you realize someone says, hey, is this a deepfake or not, you can probably tell that it is a deepfake. But if you're not at all aware of that deepfake technology exists, you probably would even fall for those really basic ones. But the real, real sophisticated ones, these might take several hours for them to actually put together, for the artificial intelligence to come back with the product. It could take several hours. But that's not a long investment, really, for someone that they want to really use something that's gonna, you know, fool people, maybe manipulate them into doing something, the investment of a few hours is nothing.

Yeah, and right now it's a few hours, and as the technology gets more efficient, it'll be a few seconds, right? Which is even worse. So now, that Tom— series of Tom Cruise videos was very recent, you know, within the calendar year. Uh, right here is a little bit older. This is, uh, what does it say, 2018? So we're looking at, you know, 3 or so years ago.

We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time, even if they would never say those things. So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don't know, Killmonger was right, or Ben Carson is in the sunken place, or how about this, simply President Trump is a total and complete dipshit. Now you see, I would never say these things, at least not my public address, but someone else would.

So that is 3 years ago, and that's— I mean, I, I'm looking at that and that to me looks like President Obama. I actually— it actually is President Obama, but I think what you're looking at is his mouth is not actually President Obama's mouth. I think what they did with that one, that I, that I can tell, that I can as I'm dissecting it, is that they, they used somebody else's mouth, lips, teeth, tongue, and, uh, transposed it on President— former President Obama's face via video.

Yeah.

And, uh, and they literally put words in his mouth.

Well, the, the, the, the, the audio though, I mean, it's not— what, what, you know, got me right away is that that doesn't quite sound like him, you know. His voice was a little bit—

it's close, but it's not.

Yeah.

And if you looked at— if you watch it again, you would see that he's not blinking very much. And I think a lot of the very early deepfakes, some of those facial movements to include blinking, they didn't really have those. But that's been easily corrected now in the more sophisticated software. It's almost perfect. It really is.

So, you know, and it's not just videos. So I I did some searches in this topic before we got on, um, the podcast. And, um, check this out. Like, so this is like just awesome and beautiful all at the same time. Uh, photos, right? So this is from Motherboard. Can you tell if these cherries floating in water are a simulation, right? So every day brings another graphical breakthrough that boggles the mind. Computer-generated images of food have reached a terrifying fidelity, and pictures of baked goods on the internet can't be trusted. The intricacies of water have long eluded the best simulations— you know, water being a very difficult, um, uh, I guess, um, uh, item, uh, for physicality to duplicate, right? Uh, the intricacies of water have long eluded the best simulations, but now researchers across the planet have collaborated to create stunning renderings of surface tensions. A paperclip floating in water, cherries sinking into milk, and thumbtacks colliding in water can all be simulated with stunning realism and fidelity. So I know from taking classes on photography and that a lot of classes in photography, they want you to take pictures of water and images in water because water— there's a lot of stunning images that can occur from mirroring within water and photographs of water and so forth, or flowers that are adjacent to a body of water, and taking pictures of the water with the flower in it and so forth. And looking at these photos alone, like those cherries that are kind of just falling into water and with the skyline and the clouds, and I mean, all of that is brilliant and beautiful, but it's fake. It's fake, but it's not meant to necessarily deceive or hurt in this case, or or even, you know, intimidate in any way. It's merely, you know, just manipulating technology and photographs in such a way where, you know, they are photographing water and— or using images. Now, all of this technology that's been being used in this sense for creative expression, it will eventually, inevitably, if not already, it will be used to scam people.

You know, if you go, you just go into a— I've done this recently, I went to Best Buy just to take a look at some of the TVs, you know, not, not buying one yet, but thinking, well, you know, eventually mine's going to give out. And looking at the TVs and the images I'm looking at, some of these were showing, you know, images of places that I'm familiar with, like some, some cities in Europe. And it's like, that city, that's not realistic. I mean, the filters and everything else that the TVs are using these days with the images, this is like, these are such beautiful, beautiful places. They're much more beautiful coming through these filters than they are in real, in real life, which is kind of, kind of sad because I want to see the real thing. I want to see something that's been changed or modified, you know. So you're right, uh, that's just a basic example. But with all these things, uh, where, where, you know, where is the limit? Where— maybe there is no limit.

There is no limit.

Pictures can be, you know, edited, modified to become more appeasing for entertainment reasons, uh, as well as other reasons too.

Yeah, well, here are some of those reasons. So, uh, The Guardian talks about, you know, what are deepfakes for? And like, you know, many of, uh, internet, um, much of internet creation and the business, uh, end of the internet, uh, a lot of it goes back to pornography. Like, pornographers, uh, were very instrumental in actually creating the shopping shopping cart that we use today. Uh, many aspects of the early-on web, um, were developed and, uh, you know, copywritten and trademarked and, uh, patented based on pornography, you know, and in the, in the, in humans' consumption of it. So right here, what are they for? So many are pornographic. The AI firm DeepTrace found 15,000 deepfake videos online in September 2019, and they're doubling over 9 months. A staggering 96 were pornographic, and 99% of those mapped faces from female celebrities on porn stars. As new techniques allow unskilled people to make deepfakes with a handful of photos, fake videos are likely to spread beyond the celebrity world to fuel revenge porn. As a woman named Danielle Citron, a professor at Boston University, puts it, deepfake technology is being weaponized against women. It's awful. Beyond the porn, there's plenty of spoof, satire, and mischief. And we've just seen a couple of advantages, uh, of examples of that spoof, satire, and mischief. And Peter, I've, I've actually read and heard about how there are, uh, porns of, you know, um, you know, men and/or women, uh, where they're, uh, putting images of children, uh, on the faces of, uh, these porn stars. And, and that there's, there's actually like fetishes of people who want to consume that. Which is just completely bizarre to me, which is one of the reasons why, you know, I have kids and they're, you know, girls, young women, and they're not online. You know, that my kids' images are not posted to the internet. I don't allow them to even have social media, and we don't post pictures of my kids on the internet partly because of this. You know, you're absolutely right.

And the big thing is the pictures, because they're probably not going to be able to, at least today yet, take one picture of an individual and be able to use that to effectively do a deep video fake of that person. It's going to— they're taking a lot of pictures. So the more pictures that an individual has online— of course, celebrities or political figures have a lot of pictures— but if they deeply, you know, dig into some of— some— a lot of probably viewers that have, uh, you know, social media accounts. And, you know, how many pictures do you have in there, in your social media account, in your Facebook? Do you have 5, or do you have 500, or 5,000, right?

And all of that collateral is something that, you know, bad guy or whoever would use to manipulate images or video of you to use against you. Uh, in, in this case, they're mentioning revenge porn, or any other thing. And that, that— and the internet is forever, you know. Digital footage media is repeatable. It can be duplicated. It can be copied and pasted. And it literally lasts forever. And then this article from The Guardian also says, is it just about videos? And it says, no, deepfake technology can create convincingly but entirely fictional photos from scratch. And we just looked at, you know, how, you know, how beautiful photos in, in water can work together. A non-existent Bloomberg journalist, uh, Mansley Kinsley, who had a profile on LinkedIn and Twitter, was probably a deepfake. Another LinkedIn fake, Katie Jones, claimed to work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies but is thought to be a deepfake created by a foreign spy operation. Well, Peter, that's your neck of the woods. What do you think about that?

Well, no, these are— there's a lot of different applications for this. As you mentioned, uh, where it really took off is because of pornography and the internet, uh, which does, does, you know, be able to provide a huge market. And where there's money, there's going to be more of it. But beyond pornography, there's a lot of other— I mean, there are some, whether they say really legitimate uses, there are some companies that are using this technology to develop training videos, you know, where you might be using a, an avatar, or you might use a celebrity. And of course, you can do that legally by getting the celebrity or the individual's, you know, authorization to be able to use their likeness in, in preparing these videos. So it can be done for really legal reasons. But the big problem in this industry, looks like with a lot of the internet. Internet existed and has grown way beyond its regulation. Regulations are way, way slower in being developed and implemented. And this is the case with the deepfakes. I'm not aware of any current regulation of deepfakes, anything that prohibits its use, right? So that— and that's gonna, you know, when is that gonna come about? I don't know. Yeah, but that's going to be one thing that's going to be required because this is out of the box. It's not going to stop. And it is, as that first article you mentioned, it's going to get a lot, lot worse as it gets more sophisticated and it becomes not only entertainment, but it's used by different threat actors, criminal groups, intelligence services to actually really fool people.

Yeah, and you mentioned, um, like, uh, legal uses for it. So I know that there's been some controversy recently around, you know, actors who have passed, you know, they died whether it was from, you know, uh, some type of an illness or tra— you know, they had a tragic end to their life and the movie itself wasn't over with. And I think that Chad Boseman might have been one of those actors, and, and they had used AI to kind of recreate, um, to, to finish up, you know, the, the film. Uh, but it's not just pictures and it's not just video. Uh, this article also discusses audio could be deepfaked too, to create voice skins or voice clones of public figures. Last March, the Chief of a UK subsidiary of a German energy firm paid nearly 200 grand into a Hungarian bank account after being phoned by fraudsters who mimicked the German CEO's voice. The company's insurers believe the voice was a deepfake, but the evidence is unclear. Similar scams have reportedly used recorded WhatsApp voice messages as well. So, you know, what's scary about that, Peter, is that, um, I mean, both you and I, you know, we know about, um Biometrics. Biometrics, of course, are fingerprint technologies, uh, you know, vein recognition, uh, handprint recognition, iris recognition, and then of course facial recognition, and then voice recognition. These are all biometric technologies that are designed to— like, everybody knows fingerprints. Everybody knows fingerprints. Nobody has the same DNA, um, but everybody knows fingerprints as a, as a, as a way to to mark an individual. I mean, if you get arrested, you get fingerprinted, and that fingerprint is put into a database. And that database, at least here in the U.S., um, is usually controlled by the FBI and other government agencies. And if your fingerprint is found on a weapon, uh, they scan that in that database, they can find it pretty quickly. And, you know, how might, um, that information, uh, our information that we put out there in the form of audio and video and, uh, be used to manipulate facial recognition, be able to re— to, to manipulate, you know, uh, voice recognition? What, what might happen there?

Well, see, that it will happen. It is beginning to happen, and it will happen. And the technology— I mean, the technology's there. It's a matter of how do we use this technology. The technology is going to be used first of all by the threat actors to do these things. There's going to be technology that's also going to be able to unravel, to detect those fake, those fake, uh, those deepfakes, right? This is going to be technology that's going to be developed to be able to detect that something has happened that's been, that has been, uh, this, that has been manipulated. I'm confident, but it's going to be, it's going to be a time, it's going to be a way of a long leg, and we as consumers are not going to have access to that technology. So if we are targeted in such a way, there's no way for us to really to really be able to detect whether or not that is a real video, I mean, a real person, or if it's been manipulated and become a deepfake. We're not going to be able to do it, I think, on our end from a technological standpoint. We're going to have to implement our best judgment, right, of whether or not we're going to believe that what we see in front of us is actually real. Think about how dangerous this can be. Think about— look, it wasn't recently that Elon Musk was smoking pot during one of his interviews, and all of a sudden there was a big— oh, you know, within seconds, within minutes, there was a big impact on the stock. Now let's think about if someone were to get online, they really wanted to manipulate the market, right, to be able to have a crash where they could go in right away and buy something. That's—

that's—

I mean, there's been stock market manipulation in the past, but think about if you have someone coming out who is a credible—

like Warren Buffett. Yeah, like Warren Buffett saying get out of the markets, it's going to— like if Warren Buffett got online right now and just started freaking out and it was, it was a real deep fake, like that would absolutely positively affect the markets.

You're right.

Oh, that's— it's scary because people will just— people are so emotional with certain things, especially their money, right? Stock— you see how emotional people are in the stock market. And that would just— I mean, that's undoubtedly— it's gonna— they're gonna try it. Someone's gonna try it. I'm for sure at some point.

Yeah.

So, um, you know, as, um, as consumers, as employees, as employers, you know, Peter and I both work, um, you know, with government agencies and within corporate America. We both do a lot of training. Uh, and so, Phishing Today— this is a ViaDark reading— Phishing Today, Deepfakes Tomorrow. Right, so we all— many— we all know what phishing is. We may not— most of us have an awareness of it. Too many aren't skilled enough to prevent it, which is why, you know, phishing simulation training, which my company offers, is something that you need to— your company needs to be engaged in. You as an employee need to recommend it. You as an employer need to deploy it. A phishing simulation is absolutely essential today because of how convincing an email is. And an email is nothing but a digital communication with convincing language to get you to click a link that ultimately, uh, gets you to download something or to visit a spoofed website. And if, if we are so— if we are so easy to be suckered based on a digital communication that looks like it's coming from HR or PR or your CIO or CEO or accounting for that matter, or your bookkeeper or admin, if we're so easily manipulated based on an email, you know, what's going to happen when, uh, these same technologies, deepfakes, are used to get us to pull money out of our pocket, to go down to the, uh, Walmart and buy gift cards, or Target to buy gift cards, or to get us to wire money out of our bank account for a mortgage closing, and so forth? So, uh, phishing today, deepfakes tomorrow. Training employees to stop this emerging threat. So, um, you know, Doc Reading says, you know, deepfake fraud is a new potentially devastating issue for businesses. In fact, last year a top executive at an unidentified energy company was revealed to have been conned into paying— we just discussed— $200,000 by scammers using artificial intelligence to replicate his boss's voice. So we just gave you an example of that, um, simply because he answered the telephone, you know. So You know, this is— this is without a doubt, uh, and all evidence points towards it, this is the single next best evolution and strategic, uh, direction in which bad guys are heading in order to take it up a notch. From a phone call, $200,000 is wired, bang, out of the bank account. And that all boils down to Trust. We as humans just trust, and we apply way, way, way, way too much, um, faith in the human condition of trust. Peter, what do you think of that?

Yeah, I talk—

I speak to this all the time, and it's so true, especially here. I mean, people tend to trust everywhere in the world to certain degrees, right? But especially here in America, we tend to blindly trust everyone because we thought, well, okay, it's possible that I might trust the wrong person, and but I'm going to learn from it. I'm going to, you know, but the consequences today are so much more serious that if you trust the wrong person, it's, it, it can mean the devastation of your company. It can mean the devastation of, uh, I mean, you lose your identity theft. It could be something, you know, you could end up with, uh, separation with your family. I mean, you could— these are life-changing, you know, the consequences can be life-changing if you trust the, the wrong person. Now there's a one thing I've been seeing here more recently, I don't know if they're going to take off or not, but there's even these personalized videos that people— have you gotten some of those, Robert Siciliano? I got some of these from people that, you know, maybe they're trying to sell a product or service or trying to get me engaged. And so they will send me a personalized video of them, a short one, maybe 30 seconds or 60 seconds. And I think they're really cool because it really seems to be, wow, I'm seeing that person, that person's talking to me. But if this tends to take off as a channel of communication, of sending personal videos, these things also can be easily manipulated and turned into deepfakes. So it's just, it's, it, it's very serious, very serious what can become of, of this.

So as Doc Reading suggests, a new era of employee security training. And, you know, again, uh, I mean, there's all aspects of security awareness training that revolve around, you know, getting to the absolute fundamentals and, and how and why humans make choices and decisions that, uh, you know, facilitate their day-to-day activities, their decisions on their job, the house they live in, the person they marry, the food they eat, the restaurant they go to, the car they buy, what they name their child. And all that stuff matters when we make choices and decisions and who we use as a financial advisor. And all of that can be altered or manipulated, ethically and unethically, via advertising, via the con job. The idea behind the con job is to convince that someone is trying trustworthy, right? A bad guy is trustworthy. So a new era of, uh, employee security training. And we're seeing right now, this, this, this one or two paragraphs are literally like the very, very beginning of what this looks like now and how, uh, this philosophy that we are about to discuss will be outdated and antiquated in a year, two years, even maybe even less. So companies must empower employees to question and challenge requests that are deemed to be unusual, either because of the atypical action demanded or the out-of-character manner or style of the person making the request. I'm going to get back to that in a second. This can be particularly challenging for organizations with a very hierarchical or autocratic leadership that does not encourage or respect what it perceives as challenges to its authority. That's important. Fortunately, some business owners and academics are already looking into ways to solve the issues of detecting deepfakes. So, um, like for example, like I have been called into companies to do security awareness training because the bookkeeper got an email from the CEO requesting to pay a bill. And the reason why they discovered that it wasn't the CEO, uh, contacting the bookkeeper in that— in regards to that request is because the nature of that communication from the CEO was out of character for the CEO. And in this particular example that I'm bringing up was The CEO in this company was a really gruff character, used a tremendous amount of profanity, um, you know, drops F-bombs left and right, was very deliberate in his communications, was kind of mean to people, and never said please and thank you. But the request to the bookkeeper was really nice, it was really appropriate. It didn't involve anything like, like, no swears. It was just really out of character because this particular guy, for all intents and purposes, was kind of a jerk as far as his co-workers were concerned, or his employees. And so she, she printed it out, she walked over to his desk, and she said, did you write this email? And he looked at it, he read it, and I know this because when I spoke to this organization, he told the story, and it was funny, uh, because, because he said, he said to her point blank, do you effin' think that I'd write that email? You know, this is, this was a New York guy, and, um, and, you know, everybody laughed because he's not the kind of guy that would write an email that actually said thank you in it. So that's how they determined that it wasn't him, and they wanted to bring attention to the fact that this organization is being phished on a daily basis. Peter, what are your thoughts on all this?

Well, I think, uh, what companies need to, to really start to use— think about dual authentication, right? A lot of people understand what that is because maybe they want to, you know, they log into their bank account and now they got to go through that extra step, which is really good if their bank is having them do that. The extra step of maybe, uh, getting a, a text being sent to the text message, a code and having them to put that code in to ensure that, yes, you are really the person who owns that account that's trying to log in. Do authentication. We need to do that as well in our communications within organizations so that if you get a situation where, you know, fortunately they detected there's something was off a little bit in the executive style, but if you get a real, you know, communication, but if you get a real, uh, professional threat actor that's really studying their targets, they might know exactly how he communicates and be able to produce something that they— well, that sounds just like the CEO. But to your point, if they're asking you to do something, to undertake an action such as, you know, make a big wire transfer or provide some very sensitive information, there has to be a way for the employee to politely push back until they had a time to verify, yes, this is a request that's coming in from, from this person. Because going back to, to, uh, you said that telephone call that he used, the voice sounded just like the individual. Um, there's still other ways that can, even with technology, make it even more convincing. It's not only the voice that they hear, they can see the caller ID using spoof call. We talked about this earlier, using spoof call. Hey, even the telephone number is coming in from this person. So Yeah, and the technology is available to really make convincing, um, approach people with very convincing tools, uh, but we still have to be able to verify. We still have to have something in place. Now, in the, in, in the espionage world, um, very few people know about this, but, uh, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not giving any secrets away, but, you know, dealing with sources, you use sources and you might get messages from them in different types of ways. You might get a message, a written message, uh, you have to be able to still authenticate this is a— this is truly that individual on the other end that's writing this message.

That's like a death stuff right there, you know.

So there's different codes that are, that are going to be used inside that message that only the intelligence operative and the source are going to know. That's going to be able to authenticate, yeah, this is a true message. We need to start thinking in these ways, I think, when it comes to safeguarding our communications.

We need— we all should have been thinking in this way when it comes to our communications forever. I always say, and I will continue to repeat this, that everybody you come in contact with is a liar until proven otherwise. And I know that that is just absolutely cynical to some people and that in there, but there is absolutely a grain of truth to that. And I think that there's much more than a grain of truth to that. If everybody at some given point in time in their life has been lied to, and it has affected them deeply, whether it is in a romantic relationship and somebody lied to you, they deceived you, they betrayed you, and they cheated on you. And that affected you in such a way where it hurt or it potentially damaged you or devastated you in some cases. And In other situations, it could have been financially where you were conned or scammed or stolen from. We've all been lied to at some given point in our lives where someone has taken advantage of us in such a way where it affected us. And I can think of half a dozen different things that have happened in my own, you know, both personal and professional life. And so, you know, if you come from the standpoint of everybody's a liar until proven otherwise, that is in person, that is over the phone, that is via email. And you really have to be careful in that regard. So real quick, I wanted to just show, like, in the podcast notes, and y'all can get links to this via Peter's website, Protect Now's website, it's all on YouTube, it'll be in the notes there, and via our various syndication platforms. We're going to have show notes, links to all of the various articles in which we brought attention to today. Including this one, which talks about the 14 deepfake examples that terrified and amused the internet. This is a very recent article. And, you know, what's interesting about it is in a year, this information, this article will be so outdated. You will see in a year, because we'll reflect upon this, as to these deepfakes that are being created now. I mean, you saw the one from 2018 with Barack Obama and now the one with Tom Cruise, which is very recent, and how all of this, you know, will be outdated in short order.. But we'll provide all these notes. So Peter, give everybody just a quick plug. So what do you got going on these days? Where are you going to be? What are you providing people?

I have a number of different presentations that I'm going to be giving. Used to be virtual, but now fortunately, we're going out in public and actually standing in front of audiences. So I have a number of these in Orlando to largest HR conference in Orlando, the GSX is going to be in Orlando, I'm speaking at that conference. I have a couple of TEDx talks that are coming up. So finally getting out there and getting a little bit more exposure, and not just speaking and training, but we're also coming up with some products. Something a little bit related to this is being able to— maybe we can talk about this more in detail another time— but being able to monitor, watch microexpressions of people when they're speaking about whether or not they're being deceptive or not. And there's tools being available to actually, um, be able to observe and analyze video interviews. So if a company is going to be interviewing somebody for a position, these tools can actually analyze the video and give a determination about whether or not the person is being deceptive or not. So I'll give you more information about that in the future, but these are some great tools that, that we're going to be offering.

That's awesome. So, uh, and your website is counterintelligence-institute.com. And the name of your book?

Confessions of a CIA Spy: The Art of Human Hacking.

It's a good read. So, uh, we are, uh, my team is at protectnowllc.com. And, uh, obviously we offer security awareness training, cybersecurity insurance, identity theft protection and prevention. Uh, we are also at creditparent, creditparent.com, providing, uh, child credit it freezes. And we offer the CSI protection, Cyber Social Identity and Personal Protection certification designation to small, medium businesses, mostly to service professionals such as real estate agents, attorneys, accountants, financial advisors, and so forth. We actually just became a real estate school in all of Texas, which is kind of exciting. There's a couple hundred thousand agents in Texas. And we all want all of them to go through our real estate school for continuing education. So Peter, um, final words.

Stay safe. And really, you know, we talking about these things, a lot of the listeners are really in tune with what we talk about. I'm sure there's a lot of takeaways, but think about, think about other people in your family circle, especially the elder folks, the seniors. A lot of them are much more susceptible than you are to— and they probably have a lot of resources, right, that people, that criminals would love to get their hands on. So, you know, you know, be on the lookout. Help, help your, help your, uh, your mom and dad or your grandparents, uh, also try to understand these things because they, they, uh, you know, we hate to have them be targeted. So stay safe.

Thank you, Peter. And everybody out there, uh, be— again, be safe. And look at— make sure to share us. We appreciate all of your feedback and commentary. Make sure to share us, uh, all via all your various platforms, and we'll talk to you soon.