The industrialization of manipulation: Best infosec long reads 6/20/26

Happy Saturday to all!

Full access to Metacurity's curated infosec long reads is available to paid subscribers. Our goal is simple: make it financially viable to keep investing the time and expertise required to find, vet, and contextualize the most important security journalism each week. Free readers will still get highlights, but subscribers will get the complete, deeply curated set.

Please help support Metacurity in achieving our goal by upgrading your subscription to gain full access to this issue and all content published on Metacurity, including the archives.

6/20/26: This week's long reads explore how technology is making manipulation cheaper, faster, and easier to scale, ranging from AI-generated nude images used to harass teenagers to romance scammers who have transformed deception into a pathway to wealth and status to researchers who show how AI systems themselves can be influenced through poisoned content.

Hovering over all of them is a deeper question raised by digital forensics pioneer Hany Farid, who worries that increasingly sophisticated AI-generated media is eroding our ability to distinguish reality from fiction. Viewed collectively, these pieces suggest that the defining challenge of the digital age may not simply be securing systems, but preserving trust in a world where images, relationships, communities, and even information itself can be manipulated at unprecedented scale.

AI Supercharges Deepfake Nudes—Unleashing a New Form of Bullying Among Kids

The Wall Street Journal's Georgia Wells and Rachel Wolfe examine how AI-powered "nudify" tools have transformed deepfake pornography into a widespread form of bullying and harassment, leaving schools, parents and law enforcement struggling to protect victims and keep pace with the technology.

When deepfake technology first came on the scene around 2015, it required hundreds or thousands of photos. The people who were vulnerable were famous. Now a growing number of nudify apps can virtually remove clothing from a person based on one image. With just 10 seconds of audio, an AI tool can clone a voice.

“The threat vector has gone from Taylor Swift and Scarlett Johansson to anyone who has a single image of themselves online,” said Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Which for young people is, well, everybody.”

More than half of the 557 U.S. teens who took a recent George Mason University survey said they had created at least one image using nudification tools. A third said someone had created and shared a nude image of them without their permission. 

The share of teens using AI nudification was “way higher than I thought it would be,” said Chad M.S. Steel, a digital forensics researcher at George Mason, who led the study.

While people of all ages are falling victim to deepfakes, younger generations are encountering the rapidly evolving technology during a formative time in their social and sexual development.

The nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, which investigates online platforms, found more than 100 nudification apps in the Apple and Google app stores in January. Those apps were collectively downloaded more than 700 million times and generated $117 million in revenue, app analytics firm AppMagic found in the investigation. 

Google said it disabled the search term “nudify” in its app store in May after an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal. Apple also recently disabled searches for the term in its app store. 

Google doesn’t allow apps that contain sexual content, a spokesman said, adding that the company detects and removes apps with harmful content. As part of a broader investigation into deepfakes, he said, Google has suspended hundreds of apps.

An Apple spokesman said the company’s app store prohibits overtly sexual content and requires developers to have a method for filtering objectionable user-generated content. He said the company removes nudification apps, which are against the company’s guidelines.

Teens can find these tools in other ways, outside of app stores. Many nudification services operate websites and promote their services on social media. And teens also create deepfakes using apps that allow users to swap faces in images.

‘It haunts me’

In the fallout, some teen victims decide their best option is to leave their school.

Nadeen Noel was a high-school sophomore when she discovered she was among a group of about 50 students targeted by a group of boys in Iowa. The boys used a site called Undress AI, which for $29.99 will create nude and sexually explicit images with a few clicks. Their deepfake images of those classmates then got passed around.

When she encountered the boys in the hallways, their glances left her feeling disturbed.

“It haunts me thinking about it,” she said. Noel, who just finished her junior year of high school, is now taking classes online.

The Belize-based Undress AI teases a $59 video-creation option on its website with images of a peach emoji. Users select the pose for the video: undressing, “riding,” and other sexual acts. It encourages users to recruit others to join the site: “For each friend you invite you get free credits that can be used for Undress AI!”

Undress AI didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some AI nudify apps use coordinated networks of accounts on social media to promote themselves, including one network of 45,000 accounts on X that use variations of similar text, according to Matthew Patane, a senior researcher at Graphika, a social network analysis firm. The ads use implicit phrases and censored visuals in an attempt to avoid moderation, Patane found.

“AI has no chill these days. Found this AI tool that, uh, removes clothes from photos,” reads one of the X posts that appears to be a part of the network promoting Undress AI. “It’s ridiculous and kinda brilliant.”

X didn’t respond to requests for comment. Broadly, X prohibits users from engaging in activity to mislead others.