Name: Deepfake Defense & AI Cybersecurity: Stopping Social Engineering with Aaron Painter | S6 E6
Uploaded: 2025-05-11T00:23:00.000Z
Duration: 23 min 38 s
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Adverbs of degree

We might have some new music coming out soon too, just teasing that out.

If you guys aren't bopping to it, you will be soon.

Thanks for coming to hang out with us today.

We've got a super cool show lined up for y'all today, super impressive guest, we've got Aaron

Aaron is a fake expert and the CEO of NameTag, an identity verification company that's at the forefront of stopping social engineering attacks.

Aaron's lived and worked in six countries across four continents.

He's a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Forbes Business Council and a senior external advisor.

He's been named AWS 2019 Consulting Partner of the Year for his work at CloudReach.

He's a frequent media commentator, author, active speaker, advisor, and investor to companies that are pursuing business transformation.

Without further ado, let's go ahead and bring Aaron on.

It's going to be a really fun conversation.

Before we jump in and get really deep in all of the questions, let's kind of level set.

I know Erica did a phenomenal job with your intro, but can you take a moment and just share a little bit about your personal journey here into this space?

What led you into the industry and kind of where you are today?

The intro is very humbling, so thank you, Erica.

But this was actually very much a personal journey for me.

I get to click a lot of founding stories.

I had spent 14 years at a big company, Microsoft.

I found the most entrepreneurial-esque things I could do.

I led new market expansion, which meant opening Microsoft to new countries around the world.

How do you decide where in Africa, for example, we should open up?

Where is there economic potential and partners that we can bring in?

I ran the Windows franchise in Brazil and ultimately ran the business in China, which was sort of the most crazy frontier and land of opportunity at that period.

I wrote a book, actually, after leaving Microsoft, we can talk a bit more about.

And then I went to run a private equity-backed company that was based in the UK.

It was sort of one of AWS's earliest and biggest partners in Europe.

We expanded that relationship in a whole bunch of different ways, into Google, into Microsoft, and did really well.

But I personally then at that point was kind of tired of going back between our headquarters in London and New York and all these 23 offices around the world.

And so I moved back to the US just before the pandemic, literally February of 2020.

And as things were getting crazy, and everything was shutting down, and we're all sort of stuck at home, I suddenly had all these friends and family members who had their identity stolen.

And I said, I'm going to be a good friend and be a good son.

We're going to jump on the phone together.

And you probably had this experience, but every company we called said, well, before

I can help you, I need to ask you these security questions, which ranged from, what's your favorite color, to what street did you live on in whatever year, to what's your last name?

And obviously, someone had called before us, answered these silly questions, and took over our accounts.

It led me to say, there has to be a better way, right?

Technology has to provide a better way to sort of know who the human is behind the screen, particularly to keep these digital accounts safe that really govern most of our lives these days.

So that's what led originally to finding NameTag.

I was just telling Erica, too, we were typing over here, we have a little Word document.

That's how we stay on track on everything.

And as you're talking and sharing your story, I have to just say, it's such an impressive background, and we are so fortunate with the cool people we get to meet on this show.

Thank you for sharing your expertise, your background.

This is a super interesting time that we're living in right now.

You've been on the cutting edge of integrating AI, machine learning technologies.

I mean, you have your own personal perspective on how it impacted your life, you know, your loved ones.

This is just such a hot topic of conversation.

And so talk to us a little bit about embracing this era that we're in.

How can people better educate themselves?

Yeah, you know, I'd love to start and maybe even share some background, particularly if we zoom in on deep fakes, kind of what that means.

It's a term we've heard a lot about in the news.

And the term really originated from 2017, 2018, a user on Reddit, who was sort of created adult content using celebrity faces and bodies and mixing them together and creating call it new pieces of work, and sort of gave birth to this category of deep fakes.

Their handle had deep fake in the name, and we've adopted that term.

And it used to mean, you know, Photoshop used to mean manipulating a picture or in our world, it meant manipulating like a driver's license.

You know, that easiest way to fake someone's driver's license wasn't to make a physical copy.

It was to use Photoshop, edit a few things, and then save as PDF and upload it to somewhere.

And suddenly you could be who you wanted to be in the digital world.

Deep fakes, however, meant that suddenly we had these gen AI tools to make much more sophisticated versions, not only of, let's say, the document, but of the person.

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Deepfake Defense & AI Cybersecurity: Stopping Social Engineering with Aaron Painter | S6 E6

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