In the second part of this 3-episode series of vignettes from the documentary-in-production, “The Only Human in the Room” we’re hot on the trail of “Austin.” He first showed up as a job candidate for a senior software engineering job on a Zoom call with Pindrop recruiter Katelyn Halbert. The next day, I drove seven hours south from Indianapolis to Chattanooga to confer with Michael “Barni” Barnhart who runs nation state threat intelligence for cybersecurity company DTEX.
That road trip was just long enough for Barni to confer with his community of experts to see whether “Austin” had shown up anywhere on their databases — and where he was coming from. They found variations of this candidate in several places; given Barni’s extensive expertise in the behavior of North Korean agents, the origin point of this actor was now obvious.
Still, Barni was surprised by the growing level of sophistication of these authoritarian state infiltrators. While it was clear that “Austin” was reading when providing many of his responses, it seemed that he was also being fed information in real-time from some sort of AI-generated system. And face swap technology from the dark web continues to improve, as we’ll explore further in Part 3 of “The Case of the North Korean Deepfake.”
