Iran Tested It First: What State-Sponsored Deepfakes Mean for Every CISO in the Room
About This Session
Over the course of the 2026 war with Iran, hundreds of unique AI-generated deepfakes pushing pro-Iran narratives have been identified. Fake missile strikes, fabricated battlefield victories, synthetic news broadcasts, AI-generated images confirmed by Google's own watermarking tool, and a video that hit 70 million views before anyone traced it to a military video game. The volume wasn't an accident. It was the strategy. The goal isn't to make you believe any single fake. It's to make you doubt everything you see. This is the liar's dividend — and it isn't staying in the Middle East.
State actors are running the world's most sophisticated adversarial AI lab, and enterprise security teams are the next target. Drawing on original research from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, this talk examines how Iran, Russia, and China have developed distinct but mutually reinforcing roles in AI-enabled influence operations: Iran as the content lab, Russia as the amplification infrastructure, and China as the precision targeting engine. The tactics being refined against governments and militaries today become commodity tools available to criminal enterprises within months, not years.
This talk goes beyond threat awareness. Attendees will leave with a clear-eyed view of where platform detection is failing — Meta's metadata-only gaps, Grok's contradictory deepfake assessments, Google AI summaries validating disinformation — and what those failures reveal about enterprise defense posture. FDD's research goes deeper still, including original work on how authoritarian propaganda patterns are baked into the LLMs your organization already relies on. The national security intelligence is the early warning. The enterprise implications are the talk.
Leah Siskind is an AI Fellow and Director of Impact at FDD's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, a veteran of the U.S. Digital Service in the White House and DHS AI Corps, and a recognized voice on adversarial AI. She has written on deepfakes for The Cipher Brief, The National Interest, and has spoken on the topic on Fox News, including on the Brian Kilmeade Show and Fox News Live.
State actors are running the world's most sophisticated adversarial AI lab, and enterprise security teams are the next target. Drawing on original research from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, this talk examines how Iran, Russia, and China have developed distinct but mutually reinforcing roles in AI-enabled influence operations: Iran as the content lab, Russia as the amplification infrastructure, and China as the precision targeting engine. The tactics being refined against governments and militaries today become commodity tools available to criminal enterprises within months, not years.
This talk goes beyond threat awareness. Attendees will leave with a clear-eyed view of where platform detection is failing — Meta's metadata-only gaps, Grok's contradictory deepfake assessments, Google AI summaries validating disinformation — and what those failures reveal about enterprise defense posture. FDD's research goes deeper still, including original work on how authoritarian propaganda patterns are baked into the LLMs your organization already relies on. The national security intelligence is the early warning. The enterprise implications are the talk.
Leah Siskind is an AI Fellow and Director of Impact at FDD's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, a veteran of the U.S. Digital Service in the White House and DHS AI Corps, and a recognized voice on adversarial AI. She has written on deepfakes for The Cipher Brief, The National Interest, and has spoken on the topic on Fox News, including on the Brian Kilmeade Show and Fox News Live.
Speaker
Leah Siskind
Director of impact and AI research fellow - Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Leah Siskind is FDD’s director of impact and AI research fellow at FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. At CCTI, her research focuses on the adversarial use of AI by state and non-state actors — including Iran, China, Russia, North Korea — targeting the United States and its allies.
Leah served as the deputy director of the AI Corps at DHS. She previously spent four years with the U.S. Digital Service in the White House, where she led efforts to modernize government technology. Her private sector experience includes roles at data and analytics companies such as Palantir and Uptake. Earlier in her career, she served as chief of staff to former Obama adviser David Axelrod and worked in diplomacy as a representative of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Leah served as the deputy director of the AI Corps at DHS. She previously spent four years with the U.S. Digital Service in the White House, where she led efforts to modernize government technology. Her private sector experience includes roles at data and analytics companies such as Palantir and Uptake. Earlier in her career, she served as chief of staff to former Obama adviser David Axelrod and worked in diplomacy as a representative of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
