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Okay. Here's how this all started. I was invited to do a presentation at a HIMSS Regional conference in Portland, the lunchtime keynote, and they gave me a lot of leeway to choose my topic.

At the time. I'd just come out of one of our 229 Project Chief Information Security Officer Summits in Boston. A few of the participants had mentioned an emerging security challenge:

North Koreans posing as legitimate employees at companies across the country, including healthcare organizations, as a way to funnel funds back to North Korea.

So, I dove into that topic on the flight home and was surprised about how much I'd not heard about this North Korean cyber scam. I did a bit more digging.

I had some conversations with friends who do this kind of "cloak and dagger" research for a living, and I wrapped up the presentation for Portland. What I didn't expect was the reaction from those in the audience. After the presentation finished, there were lots of questions, lots of concerns, even disbelief from some in the audience.

So, I decided to convert the presentation into an article for LinkedIn. On June 4th, I published, "You've Been Catfished. The new remote work employee you just hired is actually a North Korean Hacker". The results surprised me, again. Thousands of impressions, lots of comments, and more messages.

Many of those who wrote, asked if I could go deeper on synthetic media and other types of deep fakes, they'd heard about.

One of the folks said, "Everything is fake. At least that's how I look at everything now until I can be convinced otherwise, can you help?"

And so with that idea in mind, from time to time, I'll add a new episode of "UnFake" to the existing "UnHack" series of podcasts and newsletters. I'll explore the good, bad, and ugly side of unreal and synthetic media, from voice clones to deepfakes, to influencers who use AI to write their articles.

I'll look at what's real, what's fake, and why it matters.

Oh, and before you leave. It's important that I start this whole thing by sharing my first "UnFake" -- here it goes. This is not really my voice. It's a completely AI-Generated deep fake.

I wrote the script. This is a machine created version of my voice, and I've done NO editing for tone or emotion.

This is an out-of-the-box deep fake.

I'll tell you all about it, on an upcoming episode of "UnFake" -- part of the "UnHack-the-Podcast' series.