Federal Tech Podcast: Is Identity a $10B Problem?

The Federal Trade Commission recently estimated that nationwide fraud tops ten billion dollars. Most of the efforts to stop this abuse start with identification.

However, the federal response has been weak.

Today, we have a former federal leader and current Vice President and Head of Public Sector Strategy for Society on the podcast, Jordan Burris. He opens with the obvious – if malicious actors are leveraging artificial intelligence to attack identities, then the only logical response is to use AI against AI.

AI allows malicious actors to assemble identity information for fast access. Recent reports highlight a concept called an “identity access broker.” This is a company that stores compromised credentials and sells them like one would buy shoes.

“We adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to build models that we’re using to assess the risk of an applicant or an individual as they’re engaging with an online digital service,” said Burris.

From his perspective, the federal government has not moved away from legacy systems fast enough and is leaving itself vulnerable. For example, a traditional system may approve an identity, but not be able to continuously maintain that identification. It has been shown that Multi-factor Authentication can leave sessions open where an initial valid identity can be compromised.

Identity is not stagnant and innovative approaches can look at many aspects of identity, including liveness detection.