Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blackbird.ai CEO Wasim Khaled (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Two questions based on what you said. How prevalent is this kind of cyberattack on the brands today?

Wasim Khaled: It is surprisingly very high. It’s amazing that a lot of the organizations have not fully understood the impact that it has on them because they don’t have the methods to detect these types of attacks. These things are happening all the time.

The systems that they use today are so antiquated that they can’t really look past the high volume. Now we’re looking at that stickiness metric that social platforms look at to gauge success. When I say engagement, it’s simple. It’s just likes, plus shares, plus comments, plus reactions.

Here’s the problem. They use that metric as a proxy for harm. That can be very easily gained by the type of threat actors we see every day. One example I can give you is of a pharmaceutical company working on a COVID vaccine.

One of the biggest concerns across the board is that there are many groups that would rather have people not take a COVID vaccine. The recent study said that one in three Americans won’t take the vaccine even if it was available now.

The pharmaceutical companies as well as the World Health Organization and CDC are not very comfortable with that. You’ve got antivax groups. You’ve got QAnon groups. You have people who spew all sorts of conspiracies around COVID.

One of the biggest ones is that if we take the COVID vaccine, we’re going to get chipped and the government is going to track us everywhere we go. People say this on social media on a cellphone with two high-resolution cameras, a microphone, and a GPS and they’re scared of getting tracked by a vaccine.

Those are the kinds of things that companies like pharmaceuticals have to understand. If I have to push out a COVID vaccine, how am I going to be attacked? How is my reputation going to be under attack? How will our CEO or Head Scientist be attacked online?

At the broader level, if someone puts out a conspiracy theory about this  company, you have another major problem where people may not accept that vaccine. This is a bigger societal problem and you can pull in nation states.

For example, the CCP may not want Americans to take a vaccine because we’ll end up staying in a closed locked down fashion and economically shrinking. You may see nation states come in and try to spread those conspiracies further and faster.

The company is not only under attack from NGO and activists who are against big pharmaceuticals, but also from nation states. You see this melding of nation state disinformation, NGO and activist disinformation and campaigns, and disgruntled workers who may have been affected by the opioid crisis. You can get attacked from all fronts.

I used the pharma example because it’s an easier one, but there are far more nuanced and unusual ones that come up on a regular basis. You’d never think that a company like this would be under attack. Wayfair is a great example. I don’t know if you followed that?

Sramana Mitra: No, I haven’t followed that.

Wasim Khaled: It’s mostly online furniture sales. This particular conspiracy spun up overnight in message boards. The conspiracy spun out of the QAnon groups who have some pretty wild beliefs. The gist of the story was that Wayfair is trafficking children on their websites with code names on expensive cabinets.

These are steel cabinets that are $10,000 to $12,000 and happen to have female names. They convinced a bunch of people with some complex videos and walkthroughs that Wayfair was trafficking people.

That went viral. People started picking it up. It just went like wildfire. I can only imagine what Wayfair made of this. A big piece of what we do is about detecting these problems faster so you can address them without being on your heels. 

Sramana Mitra: You take a cybersecurity or early detection kind of approach to it. 

Wasim Khaled: Absolutely. This is on the radar of every single CISO in every Fortune 500 company. They’re going to have a rude awakening one day. Then maybe they’ll divert more and more dollars to it. As an example, you spend hundreds of millions of dollars at Fortune 500 companies.

Why would you, as an adversary, spend countless dollars and man hours to hack into a well-protected cybersecurity infrastructure to find sensitive documentation or leak certain information about your clients when you can just make it all up and have it go viral. You can just make it up.

Those are the kind of things they have to watch out for in parallel. It’s people building non-existing scenarios that can harm you. That’s something that we’re going to see trending a lot over the next several years. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of awareness among the CISOs on this topic?

Wasim Khaled: Increasing. We see some bigger companies, Fortune 10 and 20, that are aware of it. Some of those companies have been talking to us since last May. Those guys know what they’re doing. They’re at the highest level of threat and also have the budgets. What we’re seeing now is that it’s starting to go much wider.

For example, investors adding disinformation to their cybersecurity investment thesis. We see organizations that have reached out to us and have started pulling us into reports that they’re pushing out to CISOs to get them aware that these are problems they need to be focusing on.

I would say it’s so much more advanced than it was two to three years ago when the things that we were saying were falling on deaf ears. Today, it’s a whole different world even for us when we’re out in the market. It’s on the rise.

For us, especially three years ago, it felt like what people in the cybersecurity space must have felt like in the earliest days before people knew they needed to protect their networks. Today, it’s table steaks. 

Sramana Mitra: What do you do? If you are a company that is hit by a problem like this, how do you deal with it? What are you seeing?

Wasim Khaled: This is probably the most frequently asked question. There are a couple of different ways to deal with this. I don’t go into too much detail on this because the more detail we go into, the more easily someone can reverse-engineer some of the methods we use.

There is a set process in the crisis management and public relations space that these Fortune 100 work with. They have teams and methodologies to address these things in the media and countermeasure them in pretty proactive ways. These are not small companies.

If they’re contracting a crisis communications company, they might have a team of 20 to 30 people working on one customer 24/7. We are a company that uses sophisticated AI technology to help measure, in a way that no one can today, these hidden signals that identify disinformation or harmful emerging conversations or attacks.

How do we measure that better than anyone else today? Our countermeasure methods, which are going to be released around Q2 or Q3 of next year, are still under wraps today. They are automated countermeasures that are more push button versus having to do this large manual team-driven process.

It’s not completely devoid of humans though. Addressing the issue is not about deleting it from social media. That’s not going to happen. That’s the platform’s purview. You have to address it outside of that solution. You can’t unwind it once it’s out.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blackbird.ai CEO Wasim Khaled
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