Source: Norman Pogson via Alamy Stock Photo

NEWS BRIEF

Deepfakes are becoming a threat to recordings and live video streams of Scottish Parliamentary proceedings.

Scottish Parliament TV is a website providing livestreaming services and archived recordings from the Debating Chamber and committee rooms to the public masses. The website contains no content restrictions, allowing users to download streaming video clips in real time. The licensing to reuse the material is also relatively broad.

The Scottish Parliament was one of the first legislatures to allow this kind of public access to its proceedings, but with the transparency comes major cybersecurity risks according to Ben Collier of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR) and the University of Edinburgh, adding they "could threaten public trust in democracy."

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and SCCJR have identified three key threats that the Scottish Parliament faces when it comes to deepfakes: attackers hijacking a live stream by breaking into the network and chain of video and intercepting the data, showing viewers a manipulated video on the live stream rather than the true version; threat actors creating deepfake videos of Parliament and distributing them via social media channels for wider dissemination; and, lastly, using the parliamentary video archive provide training resources to AI for creating malicious materials to target members of the Scottish Parliament.

There are currently no processes put in place by the Scottish Parliament to prevent such attacks, but the researchers laid out several solutions to help mitigate these threats, such as developing an intervention and reporting plan, implementing more authentication checks, and creating a communications team with the broadcasting unit to support any Parliament members that are targeted.