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Accounts with GAN Faces Attack Belgium over 5G Restrictions
- syntaxing 6y agoAs nefarious as it is, that was a really fun read and fun idea to think about. But I can't help but think that something around this scale probably wouldn't work without some sort of state sponsorship/assistance.
- vmception 6y agoyeah I can identify people of the GAN race too, but only if it is a GAN that I know about and have played around with there is more out there than thispersondoesnotexist
- cracker_jacks 6y agoYou have to wonder if Twitter has any incentive to actually block these sorts of attacks. Especially as the attacks get better and harder to detect, the less it impacts Twitter's bottom line.
- raverbashing 6y agoIt probably counts as more active users and more ad views so I guess it's fine by them? Facebook already established it's fine to fake audience data to advertisers.
- er4hn 6y agoExactly. Twitter wants to increase active users and stats around posts and other interactions. Those are used to then drive sales of ads. Active users doesn't tie cleanly to the effectiveness of ads, but it looks like a nice top of line number.
- RobLach 6y agoThese bots are the perfect targets for showing ads about 5G given how interested they are in it! Maybe someday we can just do away with human run accounts.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoWasteNet: A botnet designed to waste as much advertising cash as possible as quickly as possible. Download the Chrome extension and you can "adopt" bots which will be used to destroy more and more ad value.
- Klinky 6y agoMove over white males ages 18 - 34, the new most valuable demographic will be 1 - 2 week olds who are digital bots.
- tyingq 6y ago"most of these images can still be identified by a range of features, notably asymmetries on both sides of the faces and a lack of detail in the background" Mismatched, or a missing left or right earring is a pretty strong tell for the GAN Faces I've seen. Mismatched ear shapes as well.
- Uberphallus 6y agoAnywhere with high gradient variability is where to look for irregularities. Ears... because of earrings. Around the eyes... because of glasses. Hair accessories, necklaces, locks of hair, borders with clothing, they're all giving away most GAN faces.
- Androider 6y agoSo you just need a GAN trained with a dataset that excludes earrings and glasses. Then maybe another GAN trained to add earrings and glasses onto faces that don't have any :)
- rossdavidh 6y agoradar guns and radar detectors
- godelski 6y agoThe StyleGAN2 paper[0] actually addresses some of the biggest clues. They didn't completely solve everything but symmetry is one of the biggest indicators. Specifically ears and eyes. But also really pay attention to the teeth. If you go to ThisPersonDoesNotExist[1] you'll see that there's still phase issues with teeth and eyes. It's an improvement on the original paper but it is still weird. For eyes you'll notice things like them not pointing in the same direction (this isn't always super obvious). Another big thing to look at is the neck. Sometimes women will get Adam's Apples and men will lack them. Collars won't be symmetric and necks can have weird wrinkles. Lastly pay close attention to the background because that's where you'll likely find monsters. Lots of portrait photos have blurred background so "lack of detail" isn't a great metric. But backgrounds that are a bit disjoint are great indicators. None of these metrics alone is a great tool and you gotta use them together (unless someone messed up big time when selecting the photo). Poke around through [1] a bit and you'll start seeing some of the features I'm discussing. But I should also note that these flaws are known and being worked on so this information's usefulness will degrade with time (it's still good information because it helps us know how to look and what's difficult about faces). These of course go along with standard identification techniques like lighting, shadows, etc. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958 [1] https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
- binarymax 6y agoI am 100% convinced that if Twitter expanded their verified account program then these types of attacks would be rendered obsolete very quickly. It just doesn't make sense that there is no way for an average real person to get verified and display an instant signal that differentiates them from a fake bot. It's absurd and it causes real harm.
- bequanna 6y agoWhy stop at Twitter? I would expect some service to exist (any maybe it currently does) that can easily verify whether or not any account is driven by an actual human.
- netsharc 6y agoBut forced verification = people complaining about the lack of anonimity (which I would support too). Whistleblowing would be more restricted (or they could trust Twitter to keep their identity a secret, until a Twitter employee leaks their info for some money, e.g. Saudi money: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saudi-arabia-infiltrated-twitter https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud... )
- mrtesthah 6y agoWhy not make it pseudonymous, and then federate identity verification by having neutral third-parties attest to who you are?
- tatersolid 6y agoBecause approximately zero non-crypto-geek humans would participate, as the mechanism is inscrutable and of dubious value. The complete failure of the PGP “web of trust” is a precedent.
- jjcon 6y agoIf verification is easy and accessible, what’s stopping a real person from getting a simple verification and then loaning out their account for bot actions (for a price)?
- Uberphallus 6y agoAnd here I sit, unable to have more than 1 bot on Twitter because it asks for more phone numbers than I have. Do they just buy phone numbers for verification?
- gruez 6y agoyes https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablackhatworld.com+sms+verify https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablackhatworld.com+sms...
- jxramos 6y agoI wonder if there's a means to verify how long a phone number has been in service and track history and association with spam in the past. Not a really great signal to develop though I suppose, could cause a lot of trouble with people inheriting a new phone number. One time use numbers are probably not going to happen either just by breaking the complexity barrier.
- cung 6y agoJust saw ads for Huawei 5G on Twitter, which brings an interesting twist to this, as it is essentially Huawei paying Twitter to look the other way.
- peter_retief 6y agoThe real bad actor here is Huawei. Does anyone still think Huawei is just a simple tech company trying to do business?
- sudosysgen 6y agoI mean, the purpose of this attack was to get more business... That said, no big tech company is a simple tech company anymore. They've all become (arguably they always were) political, geopolitical, and adversarial entities.
- peter_retief 6y agoNo, the purpose is to subvert the truth. What happened to do no evil? I dont accept that is how business is done and why should you?
- sudosysgen 6y agoYes, the purpose is to subvert the truth so that Huawei can get more contracts and more money and more power. Do no evil has never been the modus operandi of large corporations. They have always been amoral.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI'm not being facetious when I say that maybe only the bots think that anymore.
- peter_retief 6y agoThe bots are on this platform as well.
- La1n 6y ago>The real bad actor here is Huawei. Anyone could do this, and there are plenty that would like Huawei to look bad.
- pontifier 6y agoThe endgame here is bizarre. I can see a future in which there is no online trust at all. Not news, not proclamations, not even previously trusted sources. This trust erosion threatens the very fabric of government. If I stop trusting remote sources, who can I actually trust? City government with a physical presence, well known physical police and government officials known personally to me, and no others. This troubling trend does not end well.
- binarymax 6y agoYes. It’s our own Tower of Babel. All built in the name of 3rd party advertising.
- ardy42 6y ago> Yes. It’s our own Tower of Babel. All built in the name of 3rd party advertising. Do you mean Library of Babel [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel: "In any case, a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, might as well be a library containing zero books, as any true information would be buried in, and rendered indistinguishable from, all possible forms of false information..."
- black_puppydog 6y agoI suspect they meant what they wrote.
- ordinaryradical 6y agoThe Tower of Babel refers to the story from the Bible's first book, Genesis, in which the hubris of people leads to the building of a gigantic tower, a technological marvel for its time but one that ultimately contains the seeds of its own undoing. People build the tower as a symbol of greatness and unity but in the end are scattered by God and thrown into disunity and disarray. It's an enduring story precisely because it seems to so well encapsulate our relationship with technology and the law of unintended consequences. Borges' story on the Library of Babel is in conversation with this much older story.
- gdsdfe 6y agoThese will only get more sophisticated and targeted ... I wonder how many were not catched yet
- high_byte 6y agoWhat we're seeing here is, in my humble opinion, one of the least effective fake news campaign, almost by an amateur agency. Just imagine what real sophisticated, skilled and state-backed campaigns can do, undetected.
- Google234 6y agoGreat research!
- aaron695 6y agoIs there any evidence any of these 'bad' actors are running their own GANs yet? I've yet to see an analysis of where the pictures come from. This is possibly a way to attack future tracking, thousands of GAN generated pictures of oneself to pollute databases. It's hard to know if it will work since the databases can use the same reputation systems your friends will to keep their info clean. I guess in the coming war we will see.
- NKosmatos 6y agoNice article and great research. Nowadays it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish “real” reality online :-)