McAfee unveils project Mockingbird to stop AI voice clone scams

McAfee has unveiled a new Project called Mockingbird to combat AI voice clone scamming with a detection tool that will identify AI-generated deepfakes.

McAfee has created its own AI-powered Deepfake Audio Detection technology, dubbed Project Mockingbird, revealed at CES 2024. The innovative detection tool will aim to protect its consumers from AI-generated audio to perpetrate scams and manipulate public perception.

Video cloning has allowed scammers to start a video or audio with a well-known speaker and make them utter words of their own desire, that the person never said.

McAfee has been all about protecting consumers from the threats that impact their digital lives. We’ve done that forever, traditionally, around detecting malware and preventing people from going to dangerous websites,” Steven Grobman, CTO of McAfee said. “Clearly, with generative AI, we’re starting to see a very rapid pivot to cybercriminals, bad actors, using generative AI to build a wide range of scams.”

He also went on to warn the dangers the deepfakes could pose during election cycle expecting "there to be use of generative AI in a number of forms for disinformation, as well as legitimate political campaign content generation."

"We’re working across all domains. So, we’re working on technology for image detection, video detection, text detection. One that we’ve put a lot of investment into recently is deep fake audio. And one of the reasons is if you think about an adversary creating fake content, there’s a lot of optionality to use all sorts of video that isn’t necessarily the person that the audio is coming from. There’s the classic deepfake, where you have somebody talking, and the video and audio are synchronized. But there’s a lot of opportunity to have the audio track on top of the roll or on top of other video when there’s other video in the picture that is not the narrator.”