“Deepfake threats are growing potentially along with significant growth in AI/ML technologies”

Dr. Sayed Peerzade
Group Chief Information Officer, Reliance Big Entertainment, Reliance Group

Measures adopted for combatting threat
We are a digitally matured organisation, well ahead in curve on implementing the new age technologies, experimenting and bringing the things stability. Being in the worldwide operations and headquartered in Mumbai, most of remote connectivity essentials like Uniform Threat protection, Firewalls, and VPN’s, AV protection, DLP’s were in place. Only change in this pandemic is even regular office employees need to be shifted to home and for us it is just extending these services to everyone. We are the fastest of the lot in industry who moved to WFH and did not face single downtime on any of users because of cyber risk issues.

Mitigating threat situation
We have mitigated all attacks effectively. In my point of view Network design and Data centralization are a major enemy of cyber threats like ransomware and that most of regulatory efforts increasingly push against this. From a CIO point of view or DPO’s perspective, opting for decentralized, interconnected data sources is not only a more agile and efficient way to access only the data you need but actually mitigates machine learning risk. Due to faulty network design individual attacks can spread to other devices within no time. User awareness also plays a very important role here. We have the following processes inside organisations below enterprise wide for IT teams and endpoints, apart from decentralised network and data design. Decentralised networks will help in isolating the attack quickly before it spreads to all of the network.

Upcoming threat 
As technology moves ahead, there is a parallel industry working on exploiting the new techs. Deepfake is one of them. Cybersecurity as a large has to act on every single threat and deepfake is no exception. Deepfake threats are growing potentially along with significant growth in AI/ML technologies. In the engine, deepfakes is not enchantment, it is pure mathematics. The application utilizes deep learning application, which implies it depends on neural networks to play out its functions. Neural networks are programming structures generally planned after the human brain. When you give a neural network numerous examples of a particular kind of data, state photos of an individual, it will figure out how to perform functions, for example, recognizing that individual’s face in photographs, or on account of deepfakes, replace another person’s face with it. However, as deepfake innovation improves, the tech business will probably play a smart game to try to remain one stride ahead that does not imply that staying aware of deepfakes is outlandish. New AI-based tools that identify frauds will probably help significantly, as will automated tools that can compare digital artefacts that have been filed by various companies and track changes in them after some time. 

Safeguarding customers & employees 
It is a wide topic to discuss. However, we can always summarise the four important aspects - Thought, Security, Culture & team. What is that ‘thought’ process needed to bring digital innovations, what is the ‘security’ role in these transformations, how to bring ‘culture’ of innovations, how to build an effective innovative ‘team’, and sustain innovative approach in the organisation for both business growth and security. 

With security regaining priority in digital strategies, CISOs are definitely dispersing security responsibility throughout the organization and working to transform the IT culture.
My thought process of digital transformations and security combines, which I always put forward during all of my discussions
Transformations should be aligned to organisational business goals
Bring the transformations throughout organisation
Information Security should be a part of the Digital design, be it product or platform.