Business Quality Digital Media Guideline #3: Tampering

As discussed, we’ve created a set of recommended guidelines for gathering, handling and inspecting digital media used to make business decisions.  This week we’ll dig into the third guideline, Tampering. Malicious tampering of digital media is typically a sign of fraud. When media has been altered to change the state or appearance of an insured asset, the media should be rejected and/or replaced. Malicious tampering can happen in a number of ways.

Impact of Tampered Images in the Insurance Process

Photo editing Using widely available photo editing tools to alter photos, e.g. exaggerating the damage on a vehicle claim
grey car with less scratches
Drag

Metadata editing
Changing time, date or location, i.e. using an old photo of where dates have been modified either to claim fraudulent damage or repair completion.

Recapture
Using a camera to take a photo from a computer or tv screen, photo of a photo or submitting a screen capture, i.e. to create a false claim with images where the time, date and location otherwise appear valid.

Reuse
Using photos or videos downloaded from the internet in an attempt to stage a claim or insure assets not owned by the insured, i.e. insuring a diamond ring by downloading a photo of a ring from the internet.

Synthetic media
Using AI technology, creating photos of non-existent assets, damage or claims, i.e. creating a fake photo of vehicle damage. The technology for this is rapidly advancing and simplistic online examples of photo generators can be found at sites like This X Does Not Exist.

A process to detect and/or prevent digital media tampering has become increasingly important with the growing cyber threat of elaborate AI technologies that edit or synthesize digital media.

How Attestiv Helps Prevent Tampering

Attestiv provides inline analysis that uses a combination of AI and rules-based models to calculate a tamper score for each digital media item that is gathered. The resulting tamper score is a number between 0 and 100, where any score over 50 indicates an item is suspect. The analysis includes subscores over the categories listed above.

Additionally, Attestiv offers the option to digitally fingerprint photos, videos or documents at the point of capture. This patented process stores a unique, non-identifiable, digital cypher for each media item to an immutable distributed ledger, which provides a chain of custody, making the digital media tamper-evident from that point forward. This methodology represents the ultimate tamper prevention solution and even guards against the more advanced, AI-generated synthetic media fraud, where images or videos can be synthetically generated, rather than edited.

Through the combination of fingerprinting and inline analysis, Attestiv offers the industry’s highest (99+%) confidence level against digital media tampering.

Category Risk Remediation Attestiv Platform Solution
Tampering Media fraud, including: Metadata, Provenance, Integrity, Recapture, Reuse, Synthetic media Media analysis and enforced chain of custody from point of capture Inline AI and rules-based 6pt media analysis. Fingerprinting to blockchain ensures chain of custody and protects against tampering and synthetic media

Attestiv offers a suite of solutions to implement, enforce and audit best practices for digital media intake. Attestiv can be customized and implemented discretely via APIs to build a set of best practices around digital media intake that are sustainable, consistent and tamper-resistant, as part of an incremental business improvement process.

Join us next week as we discuss guideline #4 – Duplication.

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Attestiv provides authenticity and validation for digital photos, videos and documents using patented tamper-proofing blockchain technology and AI analysis. 

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Nicos Vekiarides

Nicos Vekiarides

Nicos Vekiarides is the Chief Executive Officer & co-founder of Attestiv. He has spent the past 20+ years in enterprise IT and cloud, as a CEO & entrepreneur, bringing innovative new technologies to market. His previous startup, TwinStrata, an innovative cloud storage company where he pioneered cloud-integrated storage for the enterprise, was acquired by EMC in 2014. Before that, he brought to market the industry’s first storage virtualization appliance for StorageApps, a company later acquired by HP.

Nicos holds 6 technology patents in storage, networking and cloud technology and has published numerous articles on new technologies. Nicos is a partner at Mentors Fund, an early-stage venture fund, a mentor at Founder Institute Boston, where he coaches first-time entrepreneurs, and an advisor to several companies. Nicos holds degrees from MIT and Carnegie Mellon University.

Mark Morley

Mark Morley is the Chief Operating Officer of Attestiv.

He received his formative Data Integrity training at Deloitte. Served as the CFO of Iomega (NYSE), the international manufacturer of Zip storage devices, at the time,  the second fastest-growing public company in the U.S.. He served as the CFO of Encore Computer (NASDAQ) as it grew from Revenue of $2 million to over $200 million. During “Desert Storm”, Mark was required to hold the highest U.S. and NATO clearances.

Mark authored a seminal article on Data Integrity online (Wall Street Journal Online). Additionally, he served as EVP, General Counsel and CFO at Digital Guardian, a high-growth cybersecurity company.

Earlier in his career, he worked at an independent insurance agency, Amica as a claims representative, and was the CEO of the captive insurance subsidiary of a NYSE company.

He obtained Bachelor (Economics) and Doctor of Law degrees from Boston College and is a graduate of Harvard Business School.