Accenture Invests in Reality Defender to Help Fight Deepfake Extortion, Fraud and Disinformation

Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in Reality Defender, an RSA Innovation award-winning cybersecurity company specializing in deepfake detection. Together, Accenture and Reality Defender will equip clients in the financial services, media and high-tech industries with the ability to rapidly identify, detect, respond to and prevent deepfake fraud.

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Accenture and Reality Defender to Help Organizations in Financial Services, Media and High-Tech Rapidly Identify, Detect, Respond to and Prevent Deepfake Fraud (Photo: Business Wire)

Founded in 2018 and based in New York, Reality Defender provides detection against advanced threats posed by deepfakes and AI-generated content. The company's comprehensive solutions for enterprises, government and institutional clients help protect against everything from advanced voice fraud in call centers to media verification in newsrooms. Reality Defender's real-time voice detection platform catches audio-based deepfakes as they happen, while audiovisual detection finds even the most advanced AI-generated faces in images and videos made using the latest generative AI models.

Reality Defender was named the Most Innovative Company at this year's RSA Innovation Sandbox competition. The company is also a graduate of the FinTech Innovation Lab New York, a 12-week program co-founded and co-run by Accenture.

“As deepfakes become more convincing and harder to identify, organizations urgently need scalable and effective detection solutions,” said Paolo Dal Cin, global lead, Accenture Security. “Reality Defender offers a unique approach to proactively detect AI-related threats across image, audio, text and video. Our investment in Reality Defender demonstrates our strong commitment to helping clients confidently navigate the gen AI driven threat landscape, mitigate financial fraud and maintain the integrity of their digital communications.”

Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting the power of generative AI and advanced large language models to unleash novel cyberattacks. Accenture's Cyber Intelligence researchers have documented a staggering 223% spike in deepfake-related tool trading on dark web forums in the first quarter of 2024, compared to the same period in 2023. This escalating issue requires immediate attention and education to reduce its potential damaging impacts.

“Accenture’s global reach and cybersecurity expertise will allow Reality Defender to scale our technology during a time of heightened deepfake volatility,” said Ben Colman, Co-Founder and CEO of Reality Defender. “With Accenture’s support and alignment with our mission of combatting AI-generated fraud, we can work toward defeating the most advanced cyber threats of our time. Through our collaborative efforts, we will pave the way for a more secure and trustworthy digital landscape, ensuring a safer future for all.”

Accenture intends to integrate Reality Defender’s capabilities into its existing deepfake detection and protection offering, including extending it to their call center AI automation solution.

“Financial services firms remain prime targets for bad actors, and deepfakes present a new, advanced threat to guard against,” said Steve Murphy, Accenture’s Financial Services industry solutions lead. “Reality Defender is already helping large financial institutions to detect deepfakes and ensure that their customers’ assets remain secure.”

Reality Defender is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. Project Spotlight offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology. Additional cybersecurity, quantum security and space companies that have joined Project Spotlight include Aliro Quantum, Tenchi Security, SpiderOak and Interos.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with 774,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at accenture.com.

Accenture Security is a leading provider of end-to-end cybersecurity services, including strategy, protection, resilience and industry-specific cyber services. We bring security innovation, coupled with global scale and a worldwide delivery capability through our network of Cyber Fusion Centers. Helped by our team of 24,000 highly skilled professionals, we enable clients to innovate safely, build cyber resilience and grow with confidence. Visit us at accenture.com/security.

About Reality Defender

Reality Defender is a cybersecurity company helping enterprises and governments detect deepfakes and AI-generated media. Utilizing a patented multi-model approach, Reality Defender is robust against the bleeding edge of generative platforms producing video, audio, imagery, and text media. Reality Defender's cloud-based deepfake detection web platform and corresponding API empowers teams to identify fraud, disinformation campaigns, and harmful deepfakes in real time.

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