NEW YORK, October 22, 2024 – Accenture has made a strategic investment in Reality Defender, a move significant enough in tackling the rising concerns of deepfake fraud and misuse of artificial intelligence.
Reality Defender, the winner of the RSA Innovation Award, focuses on providing real-time solutions to the threat posed by audiovisual deep fakes. This investment, which is in the form of equity financing, is intended to mitigate sophisticated artificial intelligence threats in the areas of financial services, media, and hi-tech industries.
“As deepfakes become more convincing and harder to identify, organizations urgently need scalable and effective detection solutions,”
Said Paolo Dal Cin, Global Lead of Accenture Security.
“Reality Defender offers a unique approach to proactively detect AI-related threats across image, audio, text and video.”
The partnership comes at a critical time, as Accenture’s Cyber Intelligence researchers report a dramatic 223% increase in deepfake-related tool trading on dark web forums during Q1 2024 compared to the previous year.
“Accenture’s global reach and cybersecurity expertise will allow Reality Defender to scale our technology during a time of heightened deepfake volatility,”
Stated Ben Colman, Co-Founder and CEO of Reality Defender.
“Financial services firms remain prime targets for bad actors, and deepfakes present a new, advanced threat to guard against,” emphasized Steve Murphy, Accenture’s Financial Services Industry Solutions Lead.
Accenture’s Project Spotlight program has welcomed Reality Defender a startup to the fold.
The company, which is about two years old and based in New York, seeks to implement its solutions to Accenture’s range of services which already covers among other solutions deepfake detection in call center AI-automated services.
The common purpose is to mitigate a range of risks from voice phishing in call center operations to the verification of audiovisual content in news outlets as there is a rising demand for a reliable solution for the detection of AI-Generated content.