Sergi Bray

About

Sergi Bray is working within the HEROES project, which aims to combat child sexual abuse/exploitation and trafficking of human beings. At the same time, Sergi is completing his doctorate at University College London (UCL), where he is part of the CDT in Cybersecurity. His PhD research focuses on mapping and mitigating harm arising from emerging deepfake generation technologies. Under this goal, he mapped the clearnet distribution ecosystem of “faceswap” deepfake image-based sexual abuse (“DFIA”, usually referred to as “deepfake porn” – although Sergi will be doing his best to change that). The mapping unveiled a largely copy-paste ecosystem where the weak points (i.e. points at which intervention from LEAs could have very significant impact upon disrupting DFIA) are the very few skilled actors creating the material. These actors have largely not been targeted by law enforcement because DFIA distribution is only against the laws in Scotland, four states of USA, and three states of Australia. Over 4,000 well-known individuals have been targeted by this DFIA activity, and over 100,000 videos are circulating online. Prior to his PhD, Sergi obtained an MSc in Computer Science from UCL, and a BA (MA Oxon) in Classics (Literae Humaniores) from The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. His research interests include perceptual hashing, web crawling/scraping, CSAEM/IBSAM/DFIAM tracking and detection, and adversarial machine learning. More information about Sergi and his work can be found at https://sergibray.com.