the future of fake everything, the social media assault on truth, and securing the 2020 presidential elections. These stories and more in this week's Ice and G security report. Hello, I'm Nick Holland. It's nearly not just the new year but the new decade.
It's hard to say yet if they're going to be the roaring twenties or the boring twenties, but signs so far pointed to the former, least of all in terms of what's shaping up for the coming year in cybersecurity with the presidential election. It's a good time to pick the brains of illustrious thought leaders and security experts that we work with to ask them what's around the corner. Unfortunately, some of the common threats to these discussions, the demise of trust and truth and how this can be reclaimed. This week's podcast includes such luminaries as the former shadow RSA, Art Calviello and Supervisory Special Agents National Security Cyber with the FBI, Elvis Chan.
But first of all, is an excerpt of an interview that Ice and G's SVP of editorial Tom Field conducted with Ghana's VPN distinguished analyst, Aviva Lightan, on the rise of fake everything. Here's Aviva. Truth is almost a relic of the past. Obviously, what comes to mind is fake news, deep fake videos, but it goes well beyond that.
Fake pharmaceuticals, luxury goods, food, anything you can think about can be fake. And as a consumer, you rightfully don't have that much trust in what you're seeing, eating, or reading. Just think about food, for example. I don't know if you know that 60% of olive oil is fake.
It's not even olive oil. It's vegetable oil that's colored and has some kind of scents put into it, so it smells like olive oil. See food similar in terms of the amount of counterfeit and mislabeling. Between 20 and 87% of seafood is mislabeled according to a recent industry study.
So, for example, if you think you're buying Red Snapper, you may be buying Kai, you may be buying Gruber, same with organic. Many of us spend extra money on organic food. That's not really organic, sustainable food. That's not really from a sustainable coffee farm, for example.
So, food is a big issue. Pharmaceuticals is a big issue. So many of the drugs in our systems are not the real thing, and that causes health issues. So much of the news we read has been altered.
The videos we're looking at have been altered. So, it's pretty scary. I don't like to use the word scary, but it is scary to live in a world where you pretty much can't trust anything. And that also as a security editor, I'm sure you've been thinking about fake websites for a long time, fake individuals.
How do you know who you're dealing with at the other end of the line? So, if that's where things stand today, isn't there a way that technology can reclaim that much needed trust in supply chains, industries, and media? Apparently, there is, with the good cop, bad cop, pairing of blockchain and AI. Here's a video again.
But blockchain is very useful for tracking assets, for tracking the provenance of some good, or even a story, or a video of a photograph. So, you can think of it as a cryptographically secured whitelist, that these are the photographs that are real. These are the news stories that really came from time. This is the olive oil that really came from Sicily.
So, you can track the provenance. AI is, as you know, a good method for detection. So, not everything is going to be on the blockchain, right? I'm not going to get every single piece of seafood that I could potentially eat registered on the blockchain.
So, I need a complementary blacklist. And AI is very good at detection using its different machine learning models to detect if this cod is really a piece of red snapper. So, by combining whitelisting and blacklisting, you have this ability to combat, to take anything. It's just like in security.
You need a layered security approach. You want to have whitelist, so these are the websites you can go to. And you also want to have blacklist that are based on detection that say, okay, this website was not on the whitelist, but using our detection, it's probably okay for time to go there. So, it's a combination of these two technologies that will help combat the fake everything world that we live in.
You're listening to the ISNG security report on ISNG radio, ISNG, their number one source for information security news. Art Covey Yellow is something that has sold name in the cybersecurity industry, is the former chairman of RSA, and now is a partner with the venture capital firm, Riley Ventures. Art spoke to ISNG recently on his concerns for coming year. And once again, the theme of trust and the assault on truth was front and center, his art.
Going back several years when I did two of the keynotes of the RSA conference, I was calling on the industry and calling on governments around the world to have a really defensible treaty around cyber warfare. Not surprisingly, it didn't come to pass, but what I didn't anticipate at the time when I was really focused on genuine cyber weaponry, you take out my power grid, I take out your dam, I hadn't accounted for the ensuing rise of social media and how much of the impact that would have. And clearly, it's had an impact on elections and misinformation. And it's now a government to government weapon, but I can clearly see this becoming a government to consumer or a government to individual businesses, or even business to business with unscrupulous companies.
So I really worry about social media being weaponized on any number of fronts. And we haven't seen it yet, but I'm anticipating it's going to happen. And that amount of misinformation can destroy reputations, as we've seen. And it's really frightening.
And we really need to do a number of policy things, number one. But we also have to have the ability from a security standpoint to trace where these attacks are coming from, understand them, and then turn them off as fast as possible. If that's the dark cloud for 2020, what are the silver linings in terms of promising technologies to claw back security and integrity and information? Is our stake?
Well, at a high level, identity and access management, especially in a world of 5G and individual devices become none unlike users and humans in that we have to have control of their identity and their access, so identity and access management, identity governance is critically important. Anything that helps make you more efficient, like a zero north that can orchestrate all of the various vulnerabilities that you have, technology that does find vulnerabilities in IoT and OT-oriented devices, like Tenables' recent acquisition, for instance, of Indigy, which is a very innovative company in that particular space. And third, being able to make sense of your security infrastructure with a management platform that helps pull things all together and give you a sense of where you are on a maturity curve, but also kind of gives you the reporting across your entire infrastructure, as Blue Lava does. Those are the kinds of things that I think are going to be really, really important for 2020 and beyond.
Finally, in a look forward to 2020, it will be remiss to exclude the elephants in the corner, the November presidential election, and two better to provide some insight on what's being done to ensure that these go smoothly and securely, then Elvis Chan, supervisor of Special Agent and National Security Cyber with the FBI in San Francisco. Tom Field got to speak with Elvis recently and asked him first of all what the FBI had done since the 2016 and 2018 elections to best protect the integrity of the US democracy. So I think from the 2016 elections, the one thing we learned was how a hack and dump can be weaponized, right? So hacking different organizations and then dumping either politically sensitive or different types of material in order to embarrass or to harm, right?
So that was one thing that we really learned from 2016. And the other thing that we learned that led up into 2018 was this information campaigns, right? This information campaigns, specifically on social media platforms, or other types of foreign inroads into our political process. And I think the things that we learned from both of those are now we can be aware of those and looking out for them.
And what I mean, we, I mean, we as a whole of society, not only the US government, but the social media platforms, the political organizations, and then all of the election infrastructure as well. So clearly, we haven't reached the finish line yet. What's the FBI doing between now and the 2020 election? Is that once again?
So there is still a lot of work to be done. I think the American public can be reassured. We've been doing this work. We had an after action get together and report after 2016.
We really built on it. And so the type of work that we have been doing, as I mentioned, was trying to make sure that we have clear channels of communication open within the US government with the state, county, and local officials that are in charge of elections, as well as with all of the social media and other technology platforms. So making sure those channels of communication are open, sharing thread indicators where appropriate with all of these different entities, making sure that we're also working with our international partners. So you're aware, I mean, we are focused on the 2020 elections in the US, but there are elections going on all around the world.
So we are liaising with our international partners as they go through their elections. We're providing tips and guidance where we can. We're learning from them as they go through foreign interference campaigns on their own election. And then the last, not least, is the protective voices initiative.
We're really trying to push that out to all of the presidential campaigns and then all of the different political campaigns where they can look at all the different types of tips and advice that the FBI can provide in terms of cybersecurity guidance. That's it for this week's Ice and Security Report. Theme music is by Ethic Audio. I'm Nick Holland.
Catch you next time.