🔒 Deepfakes in war. When the news anchor doesn’t exist

In December 2023, residents of Dubai turned on their televisions and saw the news. The anchor spoke calmly and professionally, with an appropriate degree of seriousness. Except that this anchor never existed. He was entirely generated by artificial intelligence, and the broadcast itself was fabricated by the Cotton Sandstorm group, linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Hackers hijacked the IPTV signal and replaced the programming with propaganda about the conflict in the Gaza Strip. Viewers in the UAE, Canada and the United Kingdom saw something that the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) later described as the first Iranian influence operation in which AI was a key component of the messaging (Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, 2024).

This incident should be treated as a turning point, not because deepfakes are something new, but because, for the first time, a state actor combined a cyberattack (the takeover of broadcasting infrastructure) with generative AI in one cohesive operation. This is qualitatively different from social media trolling.