Cyber Week in Review: February 16, 2024

Elections in Pakistan and Indonesia highlight growing role of AI in political campaigning

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) won the most seats in Pakistan's parliamentary election, a surprising victory powered by a national campaign that featured cutting edge uses of AI. Khan was Pakistan’s prime minister from 2018 to 2022 but was removed from power after a vote of no confidence after losing the backing of Pakistan’s military and subsequently sentenced to ten years of imprisonment on January 30 for leaking state secrets. Khan and the PTI used AI and social media to circumvent the military’s attempts to repress their political campaigning. When the military—which has long played a central role in Pakistani politics in part by organizing political factions and repressing protest movements—barred the PTI party from holding rallies, Khan’s campaign took to social media and recreated his voice by releasing AI-generated speeches and campaign images. His campaign appeared particularly influential with young Pakistani voters, and marked a stunning victory for political strategy over military intimidation and repression. The PTI's win, which leaned heavily on AI tools, reflected a similar dynamic in Indonesia. Prabowo Subianto, a seventy-two-year-old defense minister running for office, utilized AI to recast himself from alleged human rights abuser to cuddly grandpa, using a gentle avatar and other strategies powered by US AI companies. Both elections illuminate how generative AI tools may influence the outcomes of the nearly eighty national elections this year.

U.S. announces AI safety consortium

The Department of Commerce announced the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), which will be housed within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Dedicated to AI safety, this Consortium has more than 200 organizations from civil society, non-profit, industry, academia group, and state and local governments that will work together to develop science-based and empirically backed guidelines for national AI policy. The Consortium will have five working groups focused on risk management of generative AI, synthetic content identification and labelling, red-teaming, safety and security, and capability evaluation. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo emphasized that “[setting safety standards and protecting our innovation ecosystem] is precisely what the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium is set up to help us do.” NIST announced the creation of the AISIC on November 2, 2023, three days after the release of President Biden’s Executive Order on AI, which outlined the Consortium’s priorities and paved the way for cross-sectoral collaboration to mitigate AI risks to national security and personal data. The Consortium will aim to develop and publicize new research tools and methods, make testing environments widely available, and develop guidance for understanding and managing how different AI agents interact with each other.

Iranian hackers breach UAE TV station and broadcast deepfake

In December 2023, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, a key branch of the Iranian armed forces, disrupted several unidentified broadcast channels in the United Arab Emirates, as well as channels in the United Kingdom and Canada. The hackers—identified as Cotton Sandstorm and associated with the Iranian IT firm Emennet Pasargad—used their access to the news stations’ internal networks to display a video that began with an AI-generated broadcaster reading a message stating "For Humanity" and "We had no choice but to deliver this message to you" before depicting unverified graphic images of Palestinians allegedly killed or injured by the Israeli military. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center stated that this was the first Iranian state-backed cyberattack where "AI played a key component in its messaging" since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Iranian cyber operations in the Middle East since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel have been focused on eroding support for Israel’s operations in Gaza, and the recent breach of the TV networks represents the latest chapter in Iran’s digital influence campaigns in the Middle East.

EU rules Apple’s iMessage, Microsoft’s Bing do not meet Digital Markets Act threshold

The European Commission announced that Apple’s iMessage and Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Edge web browser, and Microsoft Advertising would not be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), despite meeting the gatekeeper thresholds set out under the act. If the four services had been designated as gatekeepers they would have been required to allow greater access to their internal data, increase third party interoperability with their service, avoid treating their own services more favorably, and stop gathering user data outside of their core service. Gatekeeper status will still apply to other services from a number of major platforms, including some made by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple. Google had previously lobbied the commission to include iMessage as a gatekeeper, arguing that Apple ’s practice of forcing Android users to use SMS messages in communication with Apple products was anticompetitive. Apple announced on November 16, 2023, the day it filed its appeal for exclusion from the DMA, that it would integrate the RCS Universal Profile messaging system, the operating standard for Androids, into iPhones, improving interoperability.

CISA announces 2024 priorities for the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced its 2024 priorities for the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), a group that brings together government agencies and private sector companies to share information on cyber threats. CISA outlined three major areas for the JCDC to focus on in 2024: 1) defend against advanced persistent threat actors, especially those sponsored by the Chinese government; 2) help organizations, especially electoral groups, invest in cybersecurity best practices; and 3) anticipate new cybersecurity risks arising from emerging technologies, specifically those related to AI. The shift toward deterring advanced persistent threat actors comes as CISA and other U.S. government agencies have begun to sound the alarm on the potential of foreign threat actors attacking U.S. critical infrastructure. Last week, CISA and a group of seven other agencies from the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance issued a joint advisory on a Chinese threat actor known as Volt Typhoon, warning that the group had infiltrated U.S. critical infrastructure and was likely capable of using its access to disrupt U.S. communications, power, water, and transportation companies. In some cases Volt Typhoon had gained access to critical systems as long as five years ago.

Cecilia Marrinan is the intern for the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program.