Black Hat USA 2025 | Use and Abuse of Personal Information -- Politics Edition

Over the past 5 years, we have employed active open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques to test the question of how our personal information is used, shared, or otherwise abused. To do this, we created an automated collection framework with realistic fake identities used in one-time online transactions and then passively collect email, voicemail, and SMS responses from that event. The key highlight of this talk are the results from 2000+ fake identities signed up to the declared political candidates for the 2024 U.S. elections (U.S. House and Senate pre-primary candidates as of ~Oct 2023; presidential candidates added as announced), tracing how information was used (e.g., numbers and patterns of email, comparison of "hot" races to "in the bag" ones, geographical responses, sentiment analysis) or shared (e.g., routine sharing and overnight/unified shift in Democratic party support of Harris after Biden withdrawal). Additional trends are demonstrated for attempting to predict the outcomes of races based upon their messaging behaviors, coordinated intra-party responses to events, the post-election and post-inauguration phases, the lack of direct mailings, and other fun anecdotes like having one of our fake IDs traced back to us via IP inspection. We will strive to keep the discussion apolitical, as the focus is more about the data/trends and what our expectations should be for our personal privacy when providing our information to political candidates. As this talk builds on a prior Black Hat USA 2021 talk, we'll also discuss automation techniques for active OSINT frameworks and preliminary results for a fully integrated "interaction engine" that enables generative AI email responses with machine generated personalities, based on the "Big-5" psychometric factors. By: Alan Michaels | Northrop Grumman Sr. Faculty Fellow / Professor and Director, Spectrum Dominance, Virginia Tech National Security Institute Jared Byers | Research Associate, Virginia Tech National Security Institute Full Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/14FDvj5

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf2k8QPEPqs