Why a life in video games and cybersecurity helps with deepfake detection

If you hear techno bumping from Alex Lisle’s living room, it’s not a rave; he’s probably coding a graphics engine.

Lisle, currently CTO at deepfake detector Reality Defender, still finds programming calming, even when the background beats are loud. Decades before he joined the NY-based cybersecurity platform this past July, Lisle created video games, supporting consoles like the Sega Dreamcast and Sony PlayStation. He’s also worked for cybersecurity firms.

A security pro with gaming expertise is a rare combination, according to Lisle; gamers make things, and cyberteams tend to break things.

“Generally, really great cybersecurity guys don’t actually make great programmers…because they’re usually very good at finding holes in things,” he said.

Lisle spoke with IT Brew about his experience moving between hacker and programmer roles, and how the dual professional worlds have given him a unique perspective to help in his latest effort: spotting deepfakes.

Pressing start. Lisle began his professional game-development career in 1999. As a junior system administrator at Sega Europe, Lisle—a teen at the time, and about 10 years younger than his peers, he said—was tasked with creating and securing the internet service provider network built specifically for the Sega Dreamcast console. Years before taking the gig, young Lisle had taken an interest in offensive hacking, using tools like a network sniffer to spot unencrypted traffic—and unencrypted login credentials. At Sega, he was sniffing out hackers from the other side of the firewall.

“People wanted to hack Sega all the time, so it was kind of fun stopping people from hacking,” Lisle said.

The job reinvigorated his passion for programming, Lisle told us; he recalled beginning his lifelong computer journey by manually typing code into an Amstrad CPC, an 8-bit home computer. The final result, according to Lisle: a buggy fencing game.

After a year at Sega, Lisle went back to school to hone his programming skills and then became a research developer at Durham University, where he designed molecular-screening software.

Following the on-campus work, Lisle got back into gaming, spending stints at Sony and Venom Games.

His love for coding led him back to cybersecurity. In 2008, he joined Fortify Security as an engineer and helped to develop the company’s static analysis tool for finding code bugs. Other security roles followed over the years. Now, as Reality Defender’s CTO, he spends his time researching new deepfake attacks and making sure the company’s technology is prepared for them—more of that Sega-era, defensive-security fun, perhaps.

What makes a gaming pro a good security pro? Whether you’re a cyberattacker or a computer-game programmer, you’re pushing limits, according to Lisle. During his time programming video games, Lisle learned how to get the most out of limited hardware and graphics engines. “You can’t say to someone, ‘Hey, get a bigger GPU,’” he told us, recalling a time a colleague created two separate graphic engines to “push more polygons through” the Playstation platform.

A limit-pushing adversary finds vulnerabilities in an unexpected part of an environment. Lisle recalled the 2013 breach of Target, which reportedly began via a compromise of an HVAC company.

“I mean, that’s lateral thinking,” he said, referring to a disruptive, creative, problem-solving approach.

What makes a gaming pro a good deepfake detector? A 2023 University College London (UCL) report found that listeners correctly spotted audio deepfakes 73% of the time. A James Cook study that same year revealed a 61% accuracy rate with video deepfakes. (Reality Defender offers a multi-question deepfake challenge; this reporter ended up with an 18/30 deepfake-minus.)

What Lisle has learned over the years, with deepfakes and with video games, is that a digital representation doesn’t have to be photorealistic to effectively deceive a human. We all have a programmer’s way of building an image in our minds, but not always breaking it down.

“When it comes to deepfakes, unless you’re really studying for it, your mind will fill in a bunch of the blanks,” Lisle said.