FBI TLP White PIN: Malicious Actors Almost Certainly Will Leverage Synthetic Content for Cyber and Foreign Influence

Malicious actors almost certainly will leverage synthetic content for cyber and foreign influence operations in the next 12-18 months. Foreign actors are currently using synthetic content in their influence campaigns, and the FBI anticipates it will be increasingly used by foreign and criminal cyber actors for spearphishing and social engineering in an evolution of cyber operational tradecraft.

Explaining Synthetic Content

The FBI defines synthetic content as the broad spectrum of generated or manipulated digital content, which includes images, video, audio, and text. While traditional techniques like Photoshop can be used to create synthetic content, this report highlights techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) technologies. These techniques are known popularly as deepfakes or GANs (generative adversarial networks). Generally, synthetic content is considered protected speech under the First Amendment. The FBI, however, may investigate malicious synthetic content which is attributed to foreign actors or is otherwise associated with criminal activities.

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