135. Mic Drop: Oren Etzioni has a way to help us sort fact from AI fiction

After years of shouting into the wind about deepfakes and deepfake porn, we take a look at some possible solutions that offer not just deterrence but accountability. Plus, something we rarely see these days: bipartisan agreement on a bill in Congress.

The GhostSec hacktivist group used to be known for its cyberattacks against terrorist groups like ISIS. Then, last year, the group took an unexpected turn — it created GhostLocker and began launching ransomware attacks. We talk to the group’s leader about their work with cybercriminal gangs and why we should believe him when he says all that is now in the past.

Infostealers commit close to the perfect crime. They sneak into your computer, grab your logins, passwords, and anything of value, and then delete themselves on the way out — victims don’t even know they’ve been robbed. We talk to the alleged co-founder of the Meduza infostealer and to some of the people intent on stopping this kind of attack.

As Russian forces zero in on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, drones are among the weapons that are coming to the rescue. We went to a secret drone academy where Ukraine is training its drone operators to help fend off the Russians while Ukraine awaits new arms from the U.S.

A hacktivist group called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans rocked Belarus when it hacked into government servers and released secret police files and government wiretaps – the kinds of hacks we’re used to seeing by nation-states. They represent the changing face of hacktivism. Some hacktivists are becoming more professional, while others are falling prey to darker forces.

Oren Etzioni used to be one of those AI optimists. Now, not so much. In fact, he’s so worried about AI-manipulated content, he created a non-profit, TrueMedia.org, to help ordinary people sort AI fact from fiction.

US adversaries are on a propaganda offensive around the world. Earlier this month, the Council on Foreign Relations in DC convened a discussion about the changing landscape of disinformation campaigns with James Rubin, special envoy at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, Jon Bateman from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. CLICK HERE moderated the conversation, and here are some highlights.

When the Hoover Institution’s director of war gaming, Jackie Schneider, started organizing war simulations more than a decade ago, she assumed that participants would respond to cyber attacks the same way they responded to traditional weapons of war – but it turns out that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

When North Korea hacked Alejandro Caceres, he expected the U.S. government to rush to his defense. When they just shrugged, he took matters into his own hands.

On the battlefields of Ukraine, Russia has become very adapt at electronic warfare — both jamming GPS satellites and spoofing satellite signals. We explain how it works and its ripple effects beyond the front lines.